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Scientists Discover What Makes Geckos Stick
Scratch-O-Matic writes "This story at CNN explains how gecko feet are sticky due to an electro-mechanical phenomenon rather than a chemical glue, as had been previously assumed. The gecko is one of just a few animals capable of climbing vertical and beyond-vertical surfaces that are smooth and dry. Researchers have discovered that the secret to the adhesion lies in millions of tiny hairs called
'setae.' Each hair is the width of two human hairs, and contains about 1000 little pads at the end. The pads are so tiny that they actually cling to the surface at the molecular level, due to van der Waal forces. A gecko using all of its setae and pads at the same time could support 280 pounds. Seems to me that his should be easily replicated in the coming age of nanotechnology." Other readers point to the AP story, as carried by Yahoo! and also playing at Salon.
Very timely... Read about this in Scientific American over a year ago! Takes awhile for scientific knowledge to disseminate I guess.....
One my profs works on geckos, he was telling me that even dead geckos stick to walls. Fun for the whole family!
Why is everyone reporting this like it was just discovered?
BBC covered it over two years ago.
Probably what happened is that a major news service hired a new reporter who heard something cool and decided to write about it. But he didn't know it was old news. Like little robots, every other newspaper in the country picked up the story and published it This kind of thing happens with just about every story. It's almost like we have one giant national newspaper.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
They also figured that out. The gecko basically 'peels' itself off of the surface it's sticking to. As the little hairs reach a particular angle they release from the surface.
this is old news
here is a link to the setae
link to pictures of setae
they are NOT the size of 2 human hairs... and actually the geckos have 2 million on EACH TOE.
link to article from may 2000
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
How to stick turtles to the ceiling?
Lick and throw, my friend.
I first noticed this on cnn's frontpage.
/. for "gecko" and showed me that this is old news (June 2000) found here.
Searched
3 of the 5 'related articles' submitted by posters there are old enough to be broken (cnn/msnbc/EurekAlert). The two that work (and expose how old the story REALLY is) are this and this. The dates for these are June 8th 2000 and June 7th 2000.
It looks like nothing has changed since then wrt the research. About the only thing I see different is that Spiderman wasn't in fashion 2 years ago. Seems like hype instead of real news. I guess it's a slow day if every news-organization thinks it's ready for re-print.
This is not my sig.
It's the way the pads are angled, and the angle of attack/release that they use.
Like velcro.. peel it from one side, it doesn't take much force, try to move it all at once, it can take literally TONS of force.
Not really. Tokay poo are solid little pellets. Very easy to clean up. The cool thing about them was you could make out cockroach features in the poo. It was like a Gieger sculpture or something found on a Alien movie set, a very organic yet dark evil look to them.
For all those wondering why this subject suddenly returned to the limelight, it's due to a paper realased today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (or pnas for those in the know).
Here's a link to the Autumn, et al. article, entitled "Evidence for van der Waals adhesion in gecko setae".
Basically the fluctuation causes a temporary dipole, which induces a complementary dipole in the neighboring atom, which causes the usual dipole-dipole attraction (but on a much weaker scale than when there are actual permanent dipoles, like with water).
Some additional explanation with some diagrams is available here.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Van der Waals' forces in gecko feet have been known about for a fair while now, at least two years because I remember explaining it to my (now 12yo) daughter when we [images roughly 500kB apeice] saw some geckos at Wyloo Station during a trip in June 2000, and this article was published in December 2000, referring to papers and articles from June 2000.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yep, that woulda been right here on slashdot, linking to abcnews, June 2000.