Snail slime substitutes!

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

The news is reported in the latest edition of the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Soft Matter.

A snail’s slime acts as both a glue and a lubricant, allowing the snail to crawl up walls and across ceilings without falling off.

The snail pushes until the structure of the glue breaks, at which point it glides forward. When the snail stops, the glue structure reforms - sticking the snail safely to the ceiling.

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

They also studied synthetic slimes based on clay and polymers, and calculated the ideal slime properties that climbing robots would need – and found a wide range of likely candidates, including hair gel and peanut butter.