Super-sticky hydrogel is 10 times stronger than other glues underwater

A rubber duck that was stuck to a seaside rock for more than a year has proved the strength of a new sticky material. The adhesive could be used in deep-sea robots and repair work, or as surgical glue for medical procedures. "We developed a super-adhesive hydrogel that works extremely well even underwater – something very few materials can achieve," says Hailong Fan at Shenzhen University in China. Hydrogels are stretchy and soft materials. Fan, then at Hokkaido University in Japan, and his colleagues analysed 24,000 sticky protein sequences from many different organisms to identify the stickiest combinations of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.