Every once in a while I get fascinated by something and, once long ago, the focus of my fascination was adhesion. This July 15, 2024 American Chemical Society (ACS) news release (also on EurekAlert and received via email) features an embedded video which explores the topic of adhesion and electroadhesion to an almost exhaustive degree with a 14 mins. 04 secs. running time,

WASHINGTON, July 15, 2024 — How would you stick a slice of banana to a sheet of copper? Until a few months ago, you couldn’t. But a new discovery called “hard-soft electroadhesion” enables chemists to stick almost any hydrogel to almost any metal, using nothing but an electric current. And you can unstick the materials simply by reversing the current. Recently reported in ACS Central Science, this astonishingly general phenomenon works with a wide variety of gels (including fruits, vegetables, meat and fish) and conductors (including metals and graphite). Join our host George [Zaidan]as he attempts to replicate electroadhesion in his basement and tries to discover what — if anything — this remarkable phenomenon shares with superglue. https://youtu.be/62BjIysFDhQ?feature=shared

Reactions is a video series produced by the American Chemical Society and PBS Digital Studios. Subscribe to Reactions at http://bit.ly/ACSReactions and follow us on X, formerly Twitter @ACSReactions.

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George Zaidan does something in the video that I haven’t seen before in a Reactions video; he highlights some mistakes he made when first taping the session by including some ‘future me’ segments. He also goes out to interview the scientists at the University of Maryland who made the electroadhesion discovery.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the electroadhesion paper,

Reversibly Sticking Metals and Graphite to Hydrogels and Tissues by Wenhao Xu, Faraz A. Burni, and Srinivasa R. Raghavan. ACS Central Science 2024, 10, 3, 695–707 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acscentsci.3c01593 Published March 13, 2024 Copyright © 2024 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society. This publication is licensed under CC-BY 4.0.

This paper is open access.