David Darling

speaker

349 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2025 last heard 1 Aug

David Darling’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Something You Should Know · How to Read People & The Most Extreme Things on Earth – SYSK Choice · 1 Aug 2026 podcast

There's no glue on the feet of flies.

or indeed any other animals, what they have is tiny little hairs, microscopic.

You would have to look under a microscope to see them.

And they use these tiny hairs to grip onto any roughness in the surface.

And it enables them to actually walk across the ceiling.

It appears to be as if by magic.

So that's a form of stickiness, if you like.

And of course, the the tongue of a chameleon that shoots out is also sticky as well.

If you want to go beyond the stickiness in nature or apparent stickiness in nature, then you have to move on to chemicals that have been created in the laboratory.

And there are some extraordinary

extraordinarily sticky glues one of them one of the strongest one was used to support a truck just you just by using tiny little pads where the the glue was connected to the wheels of the truck and lifted this thing which was several tons up in the air was quite remarkable actually when you see pictures of it it just seems impossible

Well, yeah, I like the ones where humans are involved because you can kind of I mean, there's a lot of things to do without a space and, you know, laboratory experiments.

There is actually an experiment, but it's a very simple one to explain.

It's also the longest running experiment in the world.

So now we're talking about slow records.

And this thing is called the pitch drop experiment.

And it's been running since 1927 in Australia, the University of Queensland.

And this professor back in the day decided he wanted to see how fast pitch or tar, if you like, would drip.

So we fill this funnel with the tar, you know, what you put down on roads, the sticky black stuff that hardly seems to move at all.

And when you put this into the funnel, let it settle for a long time, in fact, for three years, and kept it under rigidly constant conditions because, of course, it's going to depend on temperature and things like that.

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