Spider-Man in Real Life? Not So Off-the-Wall, Say Stanford University Engineers

By Jen Chaney

For decades, comic book geeks have imagined — nay, hoped — that we’re all just one radioactive spider bite away from becoming a real-life Spider-Man. Well, the jury’s still out on that one, but — contrary to Gob Bluth’s assertions — it is not out on science.

And science has returned a verdict: Spider-Man is real (sort of) and you could even become him yourself (kinda).

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As noted by Movieweb, Stephen Colbert recently lamented on his late-night show that a Cambridge University study proved a wall-climbing Spider-Man could never exist because the largest creature that could possibly stick to and scale a building is a gecko. The U.K. scholars’ research (which I presume was secretly funded by DC Comics) also said that in order to pull a Spidey, humans would need “as much as 40 percent of our total body surface, or roughly 80 percent of our front, to be covered in sticky footpads.” (So we’d need to be covered in sticky pads, Cambridge? You mean like this?)

Well, the crack research team at Stanford University, in America, where Spider-Man was invented, would not let this stand. They posted a video for Colbert on YouTube that showed off some adhesive hand contraptions — pardon the complicated scientific terms, but we are discussing legitimate science here — that, when paired with pulleys, weights, and a fair amount of free time, would allow you, me, or any other Spidey wannabe to scale up the side of a building like Peter Parker post-spider bite (watch it above).

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OK, fine, as Colbert noted when he featured the clip on his show last week, more like Peter Parker if Parker had been shot with a tranquilizer gun. It would appear to be one s-l-o-w ascent.

Basically, it seems like what Stanford really did was create a less impressive version of the gloves Tom Cruise used to shimmy up the Burj Khalifa in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. So in conclusion, Stanford University has finally proven that Tom Cruise is Spider-Man. I think their work is done here, but I do look forward to the results of Harvard’s groundbreaking study, “If We Breed an Ant and a Man, Can We Actually Create an Ant-…Man?”