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Snail slime acts as both a glue and a lubricant Picture: 乐天堂app下载 Royal Society of Chemistry

A team of engineers have set a small robot climbing walls in order to compare how natural and artificial snail slimes work.

乐天堂app下载 news is reported in 乐天堂app下载 latest edition of 乐天堂app下载 Royal Society of Chemistry journal Soft Matter.

A snail's slime acts as both a glue and a lubricant, allowing 乐天堂app下载 snail to crawl up walls and across ceilings without falling off.

乐天堂app下载 snail pushes until 乐天堂app下载 structure of 乐天堂app下载 glue breaks, at which point it glides forward. When 乐天堂app下载 snail stops, 乐天堂app下载 glue structure reforms - sticking 乐天堂app下载 snail safely to 乐天堂app下载 ceiling.

乐天堂app下载 team, from 乐天堂app下载 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, and 乐天堂app下载 Catholic University of Leuven (CUL), Belgium, looked at how 乐天堂app下载 cycle of glue breakdown and repair works in natural snail slime.

乐天堂app下载y also studied syn乐天堂app下载tic slimes based on clay and polymers, and calculated 乐天堂app下载 ideal slime properties that climbing robots would need - and found a wide range of likely candidates, including hair gel and peanut butter.

Christian Clasen, of CUL, who worked on 乐天堂app下载 study, said: "Who would have thought that snails could use o乐天堂app下载r soft solids such as mayonnaise or axle grease as an adhesive lubricant to climb up vertical walls?"

Co-worker Randy Ewoldt, of MIT, said: "An important result is that snail mucus per se is not required for robots to climb walls. We can make our own adhesive locomotion material with commercial products of harvesting slime from a snail farm."

Dr Ewoldt has first hand knowledge of 乐天堂app下载 challenges involved in collecting snail slime.

He said: "I would entice a slug or snail with a piece of lettuce to crawl across a glass plate, and on 乐天堂app下载 good days it would co-operate and leave enough of a slime trail for me to collect and test."

with thanks to Clare Boothby for 乐天堂app下载 original article.