Jolt of current has sticky results

Using electricity to make certain metals cling to beef, bananas, and hydrogels could lead to a new method of making things stick. The researchers who reported this method say it could find applications in robotic grippers and underwater adhesion ( ACS Cent. Sci. 2024, DOI: 10.1021/acscentsci.3c01593 ). Simply applying a current across the interface between these metals and hydrogels or certain biological tissues causes the formation of bonds that leave a hard material stuck to a soft material. Chemist Srinivasa Raghavan and his team at the University of Maryland, College Park , conducted the study on the phenomenon and call it hard-soft electroadhesion. Some forms of electroadhesion—in which a conductive surface sticks to an electrode that's hooked up to a power source—have been used in manufacturing and other applications for decades. But in the traditional technique, the bonds between the two surfaces require constant current. In Raghavan's setup, the bonds