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About House Lizards
By Mohideen Basha
Have you surprised how the lizards disobey the gravity as they climb up and down the walls and run across the ceiling? If you have, then you are not lonely. Researchers have for years wondered how these lizards stick to surface, no matter how smooth and the data that they have composed has a whole host of information about spiders, frogs, flies and other sticky wall-crawlers. In fact this research could encourage a new generation of super-sticky materials, with application from medicine to engineering. People have been enthralled by lizards and their ability to walk upside down as long as during the time of the Philosopher Aristotle. Scientists however, came on the scene with their enquiries some 150 years ago but they still had trouble cracking this mystery. At first they thought that crawlers like these may have some kind of glue coating on their feet—many insects produce a sticky substance that allows them to stick to waxy leaves. But lizards do not leave behind sticky tracks, so this theory was ruled out. Then in 1939, A German Scientist showed that geckos can “stick to glass even when all the air has been sucked out. This finding disproved the idea that the animal might have suction cups on their feet”. The first hefty clue came just a few years ago. Ant it had to do with the millions of fine hairs or setae on the bottom of a lizard’s feet. When a single hair was looked at under a special microscope, it was found that it could have hundreds of bristles, scientists also found that the hairs were not sticky by themselves and that it all depended on how the creature moved. Researchers found that simply pushing the setae onto the surface and dragging them forward a tiny bit made them sticky. In short, a lizard peels off its feet just as you would peel adhesive tape. Today, teams of biologists, chemists, physicists, and engineers are using different strategies to understand how a variety of animals stick to slippery things. One group in Germany found that the heavier the animal is the smaller its hairs. “A beetle’s hairs, for instance, are about a tenth the width of a one-fiftieth the size” says Ralph Spolenak, a materials scientist from the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Germany, who participated in the research. So, as research continues with scientists working towards making better versions of lizard-inspired tape, with plenty of exciting appliances in mind, who knows one day we may also be able to hang out on the ceiling of our home for a short while.! |
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This intel was contributed by sukkran
sukkran
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May, 2012
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