WHY does ivy stick so well to walls? It was a question that puzzled Charles Darwin, but only now have researchers cracked the problem. It turns out the plant uses nanotechnology.
Ivy stems grow disc-shaped rootlets which secrete a yellowish substance. A team led by Mingjun Zhang at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville has done the first in-depth analysis of these secretions and discovered that it is a gel containing globules about 70 nanometres across that seems to supply the sticking power.
When Zhang’s team ran the nanoparticles through chemical tests they found 19 primary compounds, most of which seem to be “polar” molecules (…
