Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man might not be so spider-like after all. A team of researchers at the University of Cambridge has concluded that, even in the most fictive of universes, Spider-Man's powers would be scientifically-impossible.
In fact, Spider-Man might not be much of an insect at all — the study points to his super powers being categorically amphibious rather than arachnoid.
The impossibility factor has to do with the ratio of body surface covered by adhesive padding (the function commonly referred to as his ability to "cling") and his actual size.
"As animals increase in size, the amount of body surface area per volume decreases," said David Labonte, a professor at University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology, in an official statement released by the university. "This poses a problem for larger climbing species because, when they are bigger and heavier, they need more sticking power to be able to adhere to vertical or inverted surfaces, but they have comparatively less body surface available to cover with sticky footpads."
The team came up with this ratio by observing a sample of mites and noting that their subjects utilized roughly 200 times less of their sticky surface areas than geckos. After comparing 225 species, they then surmised that an arachnid-like human would need roughly 40 percent of their surface area to have velcro-like capabilities, far more than Spider-Man's hands and feet — and if the adhesive area was only contained to those particular extremities, they would be wildly disproportionate in size.
"If a human, for example, wanted to climb up a wall the way a gecko does, we'd need impractically large sticky feet — and shoes in European size 145 or U.S. size 114," explained Walter Federle, a senior member of the scientific team.
From there, the scientists also deduced that the animal most equitable to both Spidey's sticky abilities in both size ratio and performance is the gecko.
There is, however, a workaround: the research team found that, throughout the natural course of evolution, animals that couldn't make their hands and feet bigger could instead make their sticky pads even stickier.
"We found that tree frogs have switched to this second option of making pads stickier rather than bigger," said Christofer Clemente, another scientist who was part of the study. "It's remarkable that we see two different evolutionary solutions to the problem of getting big and sticking to walls."
So, what does this mean for our favorited web-headed wall-crawler? Peter Parker's super alter-ego could be able to feasibly stick to walls, but only with some synthetic man-made scientific enhancement. Does someone smell a Marvel/DC crossover featuring Bruce Wayne or Christopher Nolan's Lucious Fox?
Via: Engadget
