BAD NEWS FOR DR. OCTOPUS

A British aerospace and defense firm has created a material inspired by the gecko which will could be used to build a Spiderman-style suit to allow a person to walk up walls and crawl along ceilings. The material --called “Synthetic Gecko” -- is a reusable polymer covered in millions of tiny mushroom-like hairs which provide enough grip to suspend a car from the ceiling of your living room. There are a lot of boring scientific applications for this material, but the coolest by far is the potential to build a suit which would allow us to climb around like Spiderman. “It would mean that your local window cleaner could dispense with his ladders and climb up the side of your house,” said Dr Sajad Haq, a principal research scientist on the project. (BBC)