The science that links us to superheroes

Jul 2 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

An Oxford biologist believes ordinary human beings are a lot closer to having special powers than we might think. Laura Davis sets out to discover if we might one day be able to take flight

IT’S the eyes that draw us in. Sure, we are impressed, excited even, by their ability to climb vertical walls, read our minds or burst through buildings like human blunderbusses.

But it’s the expression in their eyes that gets us hooked on their adventures – a glimpse of the humanity hidden behind the latex mask or bulging sinew of the superhero.

We know that when they aren’t saving souls they are going about the business as ordinary people – Clark Kent fluffing chat-up lines like a regular guy, Linda Lee pouring over her homework, Peter Parker worrying about girls.

They are, at least in alter-ego form, quite like us.

And so there is the slightest possibility that, with the intervention of a spider’s bite, power-inducing serum or discovery of alien birth, we could be a little bit super too.

“I’d like to swing into work on a string of spider silk,” admits biologist Jonathan Wood, of the University of Oxford, who is giving a presentation on Science of the Superheroes at the BA Festival of Science to be held in Liverpool later this year.

“I think Spiderman’s the coolest by far because he was an ordinary kid.”

He may be ordinary but he has skills that all us would surely love – imagine swinging above the traffic jammed on The Strand, being able to sense the office gossip is talking about you from three departments away, crouching on the top of the West Tower to admire the view.

Yet, as Jonathan’s presentation will reveal, ordinary human beings are a lot closer to having superpowers than we might think.

Take his favourite, Spiderman, for example.

His ability to walk up walls and across ceilings has already been replicated in robots thanks to discoveries made in nature.

“If you look at the feet of geckos there are thousands of hairs and on those hairs are thousands of small hairs and so on, and by the time you get to the end the hair tips are absolutely minute and can begin to sense the atoms and molecules in the surface they’re stuck to,” explains Jonathan, who admits he used to pretend in the playground that he was invisible or could fly.

“They make use of a physical force called Van de Waals force. It’s a small force on one of the hairs on a gecko’s foot, but over the millions of hairs it adds up into a really big force so a gecko can hold its own weight maybe 100 times over.”

Scientists in the US have created a fabric that works in a similar way and robots have been designed that can walk upside down along smooth surfaces.

“If you make a glove of this material maybe you could stick and hold your weight from a wall or a ceiling. Maybe you could climb the Empire State Building or get into Anfield by climbing the stands and not paying for your ticket,” suggests Jonathan, 32, before revealing the flaw in his hypothesis.

“One thing that could stop us are our muscles and the way the mechanics of our body works. We’re not made like lizards so we’ll just get knackered and probably end up falling off.

“It ties in quite nicely with Spiderman because spiders also have lots and lots of hairs on their feet but they’re not as good as geckos, so Gecko Girl would have kicked Spiderman’s butt at wall climbing.”