Elad’s blog

Dust is probably the most severe problem when it comes to adhesives. If you don’t treat your surface properly, you can glue your stuff to dust, and it will peel off.

So how can a gecko run through sand and dust, and then climb walls without a stop?

This can actually be a good subject for a doctorate thesis, if anyone is interested; I started to think about it on yesterday’s lecture of prof. Manchaster, the most colourful of the speakers until now.

(Just a side note: a few weeks ago I heard a fine lecture in the Technion, about a researcher that mimics the algae’s glue, which attaches them to the seafloor, in order to glue wet surfaces - such as blood vessels during medical operations. Humidity is the second-important gluing challenge, after dust.)

Yesterday we heard a few lectures. The morning started with a strong subject, a guy that physically analyzed the situation of a single molecule attached to electrodes from both sides - an important subject for fields such as molecular electronics (actually, 15 years ago a guy named Marcus took the nobel prize for his treatment of such problems; I’m sure you can easily find more information about this, if it interests you). Then was this Manchaster, who talked mainly about graphene and carbon nano-tubes (the guy knows how to fabricate sheets of carbon which are single-atom wide); he was a very good speaker, and seems like a good guy. In the beginning he showed us a movie about a nice feature he did in his lab a few years ago - using very strong magnetic fields (~10 Tesla), he managed to leviate frogs and suspend them mid-air. He also did that for strawberries. (Actually, he leviated the water in these creatures, but nevermind messy details.) The interesting thing about it, is that according to my best knowledge in physics - it is supposed to be impossible (Technical note: magnetic field is a Laplasian field, which means it cannot have a minima inside a surface, which is why you cannot create stable equilibrium with only magnetic field). I wander what his trick is. Anyway, after the leviated frog movie, he told us that he tried to create “spider-man gloves” by mimicing the gecko’s principle of climbing, which he briefly explained to us, but failed because of the dust problem; which led me to think about dust and how animals handle it - it is not trivial at all.

In the afternoon  we had another nice lecture, by an experimentalist called Tao who measures the single-molecule structures the guy from the morning explained about; and in the evening we went to a short trip at the Pratzim rivier, followed by a needless dinner in a bedouin-style tent (or some other lie) in the Kanaím valley, off Arad.

This sort of summarized the second day of this nice winter school.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 12th, 2008 at 8:25 and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.