A new high-tech suction device could allow humans to walk on walls like Spider-Man or create adhesive devices that could be turned on and off with the flick of a switch.

People are afraid to lose money and an unusual study released on Monday explains why — the brain’s fear center controls the response to a gamble.

The United States is doing little to defend the planet against potentially devastating asteroids and is not doing the basic searches that Congress has ordered, according to a report released on Friday.

While most of the really big and obvious threats are being found, almost nothing is being done to find the smaller objects that are arguably a more likely threat, the strongly worded report from the National Academy of Sciences said.

“It means we are not looking for the small ones which can cause huge damage on earth,” astronomer Mike A’Hearn of the University of Maryland, who helped chair the committee that wrote the report, said in a telephone interview.