So since you’re here, I bet you read comic books as a kid, or have kids that read comic books.  Spider-Man, that nerd turned superhero, is one of the most popular and enduring characters in the comic book universe.  From his gestation in 1962 by creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko and until right now, Spidey and his alter-ego, Peter Parker, has been one of the best selling comic books in history, spawning numerous animated cartoons, three (or more) movies, and about a million different tee-shirts.

He doesn’t have the powers of a Superman, but he’s got some of the coolest powers in the comics universe:  Spider senses that warn him of danger, super agility, surprising strength, and most importantly of all, the ability to pretty much climb any surface at will thanks to his exposure to a radioactive spider bite.  Wouldn’t you love to be able to climb up the side of your house to clean the gutters, climb up a tree to get the cat down, or scale the Empire State Building to win a bet?

Well, thanks to Professor Nicola Pugno, of the Polytechnic of Turin, you may well be scaling walls like your friendly neighborhood costumed do-gooder, as he’s discovered a way to create microscopic nanotubes that hook onto the tiny inperfections in solid materials, allowing the wearer of these special gloves and shoes to climb pretty much anything. 

The possibilities of these gloves makes them ideal for fire rescue, window washing, and space applications, as grip in these situations is immensely important and a single slip can send a would-be rescuer tumbling to a gristly death.  Surely someone would need a whole nanotube suit to cling tenaciously to a glass building, right?  Not so.

The holding power of gloves would depend on the number of contact points. Because nanotubes are so tiny, billions of them could be built into hand-sized fabric. Gloves with a palm surface of 31 sq ins (200 sq cm) could support 14 men, each weighing 13 stone (83kg), dangling from a ceiling. The grip of the gloves could be released with little effort by a peeling motion, which would break the adhesion little by little.

Special thanks to Sarah, editor of Den of Geek and the biggest Spider-fan I know, for pointing me in the direction of this article.  Excelsior, true believer!