.. It’s the first adhesive that can stick to and lift things from a distance, its developers say. The new material shoots out of a syringe. It emerges as a liquid, then quickly hardens into a strong thread. And it sticks to almost anything it touches.Once hardened, the thread can lift objects up to 80 times its own weight. In lab tests, researchers lifted a wood block, steel nuts, a test tube and more.
Marco Lo Presti has been working on developing sticky materials at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. Fiorenzo Omenetto directs the Silk Lab where Lo Presti works. The two teamed up with chemists at the University of Bari in Italy to create the new material. When the group talked with each other about this work, they always called it the “Spider-Man experiments,” says Gianluca M. Farinola, one of the Bari chemists.
For now, though, Spider-Man gets to keep his job. “I don’t think you’re going to be able to swing off buildings using this yet,” notes Rosalyn Abbott. She’s a biomedical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa. She did not take part in the research. Read more..