Slashdot Mirror
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.
Wait, this isn't about car insurance...
Wow, this submitter basically just cut and pasted directly from the article. Way to go.
Wow, I really want them as my insurance company now....
Grass-roots web hosting.We are poor colleg
Cool, maybe now I'll get to climb walls like Spiderman. Afterall, what's a better use for new technology than for recreation.
Truthfully though, this could be useful in a lot of applications. I would expect to see NASA interested, as it might be a good replacement for velcro, which is kinda limited in what it can stick to.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
This study sponsored by the "The Association For Producing Low Cost Sticky Notes".
I'd imagine we could put the sticky note out of business if we could get markers to write on geckos with......
Boy! the mental picture of a gecko 'supporting' 280 pounds is not a pretty one. Poor little geckos..
air and light and time and space
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
Wait... each hair is twice as thick as a human hair, AND each Gecko has MILLIONS of them? Wouldn't a gecko need to be the size of a boar to have that much hair?
Very timely... Read about this in Scientific American over a year ago! Takes awhile for scientific knowledge to disseminate I guess.....
All I need to climb walls are hairy palms? I'll get right on that!
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
Despite the more visible benefits of the implant, I think that getting some of these suckers in my hands and feet would be quite possibly the greatest implant to date (followed immediately, of course, with some nice high-res cybernetic eyes).
"Hey brother Christian with your high and mighty errand / your actions speak so loud I can't hear a word you're saying"
One my profs works on geckos, he was telling me that even dead geckos stick to walls. Fun for the whole family!
This has been known about since 2000 at least; we used to have endless discussions over the fact that geckos have the impressive ability to stick to ceilings in a vacuum, discussions on topics such as:
a) how did they find out the details? Did it involve a research assistant, a glass container, a vacuum pump and a large supply of geckos?
b) How did Geckos evolve this feature? Are geckos secretly descended from a life form that can stick to the outside of space craft?
c) Alternatively, does this prove that creatures are designed rather than evolved, and the design process is a bit more like the PhD process than anything else; some little godling spends millenia working on geckos in order to submit some paper 'An alternative mechanism for achieving stickiness in creatures' only to have it discredited by a board of professors who have always used suction and thats how they believe all creatures should stick.
The 280 lb gecko they used for the experiment simply asked for more donuts when questioned about the validity of the scientists claims.
--It's Pimptastic!--
This is ancient - see The BBC for starters.
The LENGTH of the hair is twice as thick as a human hair.....
Stick some Big Red in your eye and 'read a little closer'.
Honesty may be the best policy, but apparently by elimination, dishonesty is the second best policy.
This being slashdot, I (mis)read the headline as 'geeks stick to walls'. I was disappointed. I was expecting a discussion of the most effective way to stick an geek to the ceiling, like praising Microsoft.
With technology like that, duct tape will really stick to anything! ..if you can't duck it, fsck it...
In Costa Rica, the geckos were everywhere, on the walls, the windows and the ceiling. I actually took a bit of effort to get them loose. There were thousands of them. They are really neat animals. I wish I could do that, I'd hang on the ceiling at the White House....
Stupid Humans.....
Am I missing something, or is this story over two years old?
example.org - powered by Linux!
My bad.
Once again I relied on the Slashdot article for accurate paraphrasing.
SLASHDOT:
Each hair is the width of two human hairs, and contains about 1000 little pads at the end
CNN:
A seta is only about 100 micrometers long -- about the width of two human hairs.
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.
So thats how spiderman does it.
Gordon Gekko had sticky fingers
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
It's filthy, dirty comments like this. Why don't you wash your mouth out with SOAP?
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I just love my Tokay Gecko. It's as mean as it can be. The Tokay is the pit-bull of geckos.
I had a bad roach problem. I did'nt want to use pesticides in my home so a friend recommended a Tokay. I was open to all options so I bought a Tokay and let it loose in my home.
The roaches were gone in two days. It was lovely. I would wake up at night turn the lights on and see my little guy on a wall somewhere.
It did such a good job eating roaches that it eventually ran out of food. I had to catch it (not easy since it put up a good fight) and put in a terrarium where it happily eats crickets.
I love my little guy.
Here is a picture I took of my little buddy.
They figured how Gecko's stick to glass surfaces, but they never figured out how they let go! Another fifty years of research to figure that out...sheesh!
Some simple instrumentation with a web-based interface to the DCS?
It's been a long time.
The same scientist made the anouncment 2 years ago, although one of the articles gets his name backwards. At the BBC they call him Autumn Kellar, and at CNN they call him Kellar Autumn. I don't know which way is backwards.
I want to cling to hot classmates celings!
I live in a giant bucket.
Time for a few more editors here at /.
DROS - Open-Source Robot Software
That's GEICO not Gecko!
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.
So all I have to do is collect a few gecko feet, and I'm Spiderman. Ooh, sorry about that little lizard guy. Got AFLAC?
This would imply that "Spiderman the early years" would be rated beyond the scope of most audiences. I mean, how else did he manage to get such hairy hands :-)
If memory serves it's van der Waals.
It's an ultra-short range stickiness that applies to just about any material.
Anybody with a physics degree will be horrified by this explanation, but conceptually imagine two neutral atoms, really close. Imagine that atom A momentarily has more of its electron cloud on the side away from atom B. Then atom A will look slightly positive to atom B. A positive charge attracts electrons, so atom B's electron cloud gets redistributed toward atom A. Atom B now looks slightly negative, keeping A's electrons (better, A's electron probability distribution (better yet, we should be talking complex amplitudes and energy values)) on the far side from B.
Corrections and clarifications to the above are entirely welcome.
...geckos could hang onto the hood of my car at almost any speed while driving about Guam.
GIGOwiz
Of *course* I was paying attention to the road.
* Hands with non-slip grip. (To add this feature to your future child, select option 567B on the manipulators submenu. Special price of $433.34 for the next 10 minutes.)
.
* Fasteners on living, plant-based clothing. (Anyone remember the ads for the "Playtex Living Bra?" This one has a clasp the most determined teenage boy can't pry off!)
* Biologically based near-future equivalent of a Velcro Wall. You don't need a suit . .
* Security floors. Intruders walk on but they can't walk off!
What's this? Mozilla climbs walls now?
:)
Time to get a new nightly build!
(Yes, I'm aware Gecko is just the rendering engine!
Maybe I am having some kind of weird deja vu thing, but I could of sworn they already knew this about geckos!
I remember explaining it to a friend of mine 10 or so years ago and he didn't believe me and insisted that geckos have sticky slime glands in their feet.
I thought you said Geico, not Gecko!
::salesman walks out::
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
How to stick turtles to the ceiling?
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
I was under the impression that this has been known for a while, and I certainly have never read about geckos using chemical adhesives anywhere.
Lab equipment for studying herpi-podiatry: $68,000
Salaries for scientists and lab assistants: $230,000
Ticket to "Spiderman": $8.50
The fact that this was discovered only after getting the idea from the Spiderman movie: priceless.
c-hack.com |
I'm pretty damned sure I read about this at least a year ago. Not that I think this has ever been on Slashdot before, but I'm sure that I've known this particular piece of trivia for at least a year, maybe more.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
unless you are really heavy you will have to wait for them to decompose.
--
making up good sigs is a hard thing to do.
Do you live in a tall building? Buy gecko socks... for safer sleepwalking.
If I'm not mistaken, this was on slashdot about 2 YEARS ago. It was discovered a LONG time ago.
I see absolutely zero value in this article's "discovery" -- this is EXACTLY what I was told by my chemistry professor last January. This is not new news, or perhaps maybe my professor could forecast the future or something. If Slashcode had a file attachment feature I'd even attach the PowerPoint slide specifically describing the intermolecular forces involved in Gecko feet.
Agreed... I live in Costa Rica.. and the Geckos are there every night when I come home, just hanging out on or near the ceiling.
I figure they can hang out all they want.. they eat bugs, and they don't get into the food.
Besides, they are almost impossible to catch.
Some nights the outside of my house is almost swarming with them (okay exaggeration, but if I take a walk with the flashlight, I can usually find at least 10 on the outside of the house without trying)
Now.. if I can just figure out what that weird lizard that lives in the tree is..
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.
Now I think we're in the year 2002.
What I find amazing is that scientists until now have assumed that it was some sort of glue, I mean how much work would it take to figure out that it wasn't glue.
Ok so maybe because nobody cared and the glue explanation was an answer that everybody was happy with.
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.
Mine can also render webpages weighing up to 280 pounds (if printed on glossy).
If you consider its powerful tabs, its strength can multiply up to ~24 times (but not much higher - see bug 148535).
"I refuse to provide proof that I exist, because proof denies Faith, and without Faith, I am nothing."
Man: "But the gecko's a dead giveaway, isn't it? I mean, nothing could have come about solely through evolution."
God: "Oh, gee, I hadn't thought of that..." and *poof* vanishes in a puff of logic.
Man attempts to prove that black is white and white is black for an encore, and gets killed at the next zebra crossing.
[with apologies to Douglas Adams]
Apparently the story is better the second time around.
Now that they have figured it out i'm sure NBC news anchor Michael Scott is anxiously awaiting gecko resistant suits.
This comment was generated by a Squadron of Ultra Ninjas
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".
Was science fiction: now biology.
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
It sticks because that little Geico/Gecko guy is on the TV every 5 minutes telling me how I can save 15% on car insurance.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I know what maked geckos stick:
Pins!
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Lets see some gecko climbing gloves!
If one gecko can hold 280 lbs in weird theory...
Then if we rip off about 200 poor geckos feet, can we sew them into gloves and scale walls now?
God spoke to me
I would like to do gekko experiments at home; right now, I'm using industrial magnets.
Any chance someone could post a link to the most recent "setae at home" clients?
Thanks in advance,
-- Terry
I'm fairly sure I saw some news channel say it the exact same way.
Know you know all of our secrets! We'll have to kill you now.... *Shuffles off into the dark recesses of the ceiling to plot mankind's demise*
-- Mr. E Gecko
Snarfle.
If the forces in use are only Van der Waals, and these forces are present everywhere, what makes geckos, or rather their little hairs, special so that their molecules can stick to walls and mine can't?
The article mentions how it has something to do with the geometry of the hairs, but doesn't go into detail. Any physicists care to shed some light on this?
Gecko steaks! Get your GECKO steaks! Admittedly it isn't Dragon Cuisine but what is these days?
who's obiously been stuck to the wall one too many times... Watch out! Here they come again! Psych!
Since it's an electro-mechanical phenomenon all that would be needed are gloves with these setae on them. No genetic tom-foolery required.
Um...
I think if you do (ahem) that so much, it'll be your wife climbing the walls.
Yes I agree, this is old stuff, I saw a document about geckos once which mentioned it
One more lame thing...it's "van" de Waals not "can" der Waals, as in Johannes Diderik. Obviously your advisor didn't show you a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary.
How many geckos would I have to skin to make me some gecko-gloves and gecko-socks?
Apparently this guy is already using them in his shoes.
RMN
~~~
...by the complete lack of Geico jokes! But really, am I the only one who, when reading this, immediately imagined the little Geigo gecko, and assumed I was in for a bunch of comments about Geigo?
________________________________________________
suwain_2
May be closer than he thinks.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
This story is just not going to stick.
Table-ized A.I.
I noticed that if I farted hard enough, my room-mates somehow found a way to climb and stick to the far corner of the room.
Table-ized A.I.
Am I the only one who when they first read the headline thought: "What the heck? You mean there is a real scientific reason that people choose Mozilla over IE aside from the no brainer ones? Such as freedom of choice, security, popup blockage, and giving MS the finger over port 80 instead of 79." No really, I thought there might be some sort of previously unknown sociological or psychological thing concerning large lizards whose RGB color is a multiple of 42 (read: color=#840000) or the concept of geckos running everything behind the scenes (read: mice).
No really, thats actually what went through my mind.
We're going to make information free Mr. Anderson, whether you like it, or not.
You have reached the Gecko... ...you probably wanted Geico...leave a message at the beep.
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
I guess I misread the headline "What Makes Gecko [as in Mozilla's HTML rendering engine] Sick" ...
Oops, forgot the details. Hook a vacuum cleaner up to the DCS.
There. Forgot half the punchline, but meh...
It's been a long time.
Patient:
Hey doc...
Surgeon:
What seems to be the problem?
Patient:
Well, I got this gecko... (pointing to bum)
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
If I'm not mistaken, I think the point of the article is not what makes geckos stick. The main point of the article is the tiny blurb about how researchers managed to REPLICATE this effect syntheticly. That is what is important. I think I'm going to rush out to the patent office tomorrow and Copyright "Gecko Gloves."
Here I thought the wall climbing trick would be the most unlikely to reproduse.
Yes "c" and "v" are close on the keyboard. That is why the all-knowing Team of Attack Midgets gave us a button called "Preview," and yes, it works.
And while some of us did undergraduate theses, some of us have written doctoral dissertations. Given mine was in biophysics, I generally know physics as well as most undergrads ;) But seriously, I'll be waiting to read your paper in Physics Letters should your peers deem your work a valuable contribution to science. Hopefully, your manuscript's final resting place isn't in your advisor's desk drawer.
Pretty cool that your advisor threw you on as a second or third author. I thought the medical fields were the only ones that put techs on papers. Typically, techs or work study students go under acknowledgements. Party on.
The movie Spider-Man appears to have inspired the scientists in investigating how a gecko's feet work.
:)
The movie Spider-Man was directed by Sam Raimi.
The Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 were also directed by Sam Raimi. Without these cult classics, Spider-Man may have never been filmed, or it may not have been as good as it was.
In other words, we can thank the movie Evil Dead 2 for the discovery of how Gecko's feet work!
Not exactly news...
Same people, new story. They hadn't shown yet that van der Waals forces were the reason for Geckos' stickiness. That's essentially what they're asserting in this paper. They firmly believed it before, but hadn't finished the research yet. It's important, because it proves that there is no adhesive other than simple solid keratin, like hair or fingernails. It's the size that matters more than anything else.
That's Dr. Dude to you Mr. Anonymous Coward.
They also make the sweetest Linux
Actually, that's a dinosaur, not a gecko...
--Forest C. Adcock--
Hehe. And BTW, you might not want to make your identity so easily known (i.e., your email is likely on your paper). /.ers are pretty relentless. Some might even be spammers. Others might sign you up for some. Scary stuff. Cheers. The pub calls.
How about electrical locks, as opposed to mechanical ones. This would eliminate frozen car door locks in the winter!
Or bio-electrical clutches, latches, or catches. Taking the mechanics out of these would allow them to be used in many places and environments that make traditional mechanical devices prone to failure (or at least expensive to maintain).
Alan Page
Looks like the scientific community needs to communicate a little better, that way they won't waste so much time re-inventing the wheel over and over. Heard this on NPR years ago. Here's an article about it on the BBC's website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/781611.stm
It's good to see someone at my old alma mater Lewis & Clark College making some headlines. Just to prolong the slashdotting, here are some cool microscopic photos and a QT movie of gecko foot hairs and microsensors.
more of a spider question really. as most of you will remember, in the recent spider(-)man movie, peter can stick to walls by a mechanism similar to the one described above, with the little hairy claw thingees and all. however in the comic books spidey doesn't have the claws.
i distinctly remember two alternative explanations for this being provided. the first, is in a panel from an old issue (its his second fight with stilt man if that helps, the one where stilt man breaks into the research lab to rebuild his suit). ealier that day spidey/peter stops a bag snatcher on the subway by 'sticky grabbing' the guys jacket. in this panel there is a definate goo like substance twix sideys hand and the guys jacket.
problem solved right? wrong! see one must also consider the issue (from the whole sin-eater comes back crippled storyline) where electro discovers that spidey sticks to walls by electro magnetic adhesion, giving electro a distinct advantage in battle.
so how does spidey do it? how do spiders do it (i mean stick to walls you filthy minded child). please answer so i can get some sleep
Well I would recommend going to a doctor instead of releasing a gecko, on my Little Guy... And look what happened when you did this...
I would wake up at night turn the lights on and see my little guy on a wall somewhere
Guess the love for my little guy is a different kind of love...
Enig? Det alt for hot det smor!
So... we could use two ( or more ) specially trained attack geckos to pick up the 300 pound gorrila previously mentioned, and bring down the Evil Empire's pet?
And so we go, on with our lives
We know the truth, but prefer lies
Lies are simple, simple is bliss
...no wonder the damned things always tear in two when I try to do pull-ups on them. The setae can support 280lbs, but the rest of their bodies are woefully underdesigned for that kind of load.
-b
Scroll down for details on gecko climbing.
Maybe, just maybe my childhood dream of being a friendly neighborhood spiderman will come true.
>
It seems likely to me that someone is using a news crawler to catch information about Mozilla, and just happened to 'catch' this story.
It is more interesting than most news about Mozilla, I must say.
Amazing magic tricks
Actually, it's a monster, not a dinosaur. Dinosaurs don't breathe fire.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
stick to walls AND sell insurance. Awesome!
I finally came up with a good use for those spyware products like DragNet and Carnivore. Instead of using their powers for evil, use them for good. Have them digest the Slashdot archives (at a gigabit per second, should only take a few years :) and whenever a new submission comes along, have them use their heuristics to see if it matches old stories!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
As many of you may know, the U.S. Armed forces have been researching a silent velcro, pretty much ever since velcro was invented. If we could recreate the effect the gecko displays I'm sure it would solve that problem. What other technical applications might recreating this process apply to?
1) Geckos can support up to 250lbs with these little hairs
2) Geckos stick even after death
Why do we need nanotechnology, why not just make "Gecko Gloves" and stick to things ala-spiderman?
You don't own it. You paid some money to someone who thought they owned it to gain that (false) ownership.
And now you think it gives you the right to keep it from running away. That's a big difference.
So many people think that it all comes down to a price tag. Some concepts just never apply to money, whatever the twist you put on them.
It was Sting (and many others) who said: "Free, free, set them free..."
-"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle." - Arthur Dent
Stan Lee knew it all along, come on scientists!
Just your friendly neighborhood sp...okay if you saw the movie, little hairs pop out of Peter Parker character's finger tips.
SIGERR: laziness exceeds quota
If this molecular crap is true, why doesn't a dead gecko stick?
i've been training for YEARS to grow them, i read on one conservatist mag. that you get them when you m**turbate! having fun AND developing yourself to be a real life spiderman!
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Duh. My cat does this already, all I need to do is look for it when I'm shaving and can't find a towel ;-)
The second picture on this page is actually a photo of a brand new super-toothbrush
This Mother of All Toothbrushes is made from Gecko Hairs. Forget 200 strokes up and down with sticky toothpaste. Now it takes just one swipe to clean your teeth in 1/8000th of a second! Cleans stains from coffee, cigarettes, permanent marker, super glue, napalm, and more!
Order yours today!
$8.95/mo web hosting
Discovery Channel had a segment on this over a year ago. They even showed some nice close up simulations of the hairs themselves.
I was hoping that day old unshaved faces, armpits and legs could do the same thing for humans, but was sadly disappointed (although with the added suction of an armpit I did come close).
CNN reporters will go to any length to get the scoop, I guess. Including kickin' it on the couch and watching the Discovery Channel.
It has been years since I have been able to fit into my plastic Spederman costume and NOW scientists figure out a way to climb walls.
>
Then it's a dragon darnit! A big dragony, fire-breathing, dragon.
--Forest C. Adcock--
According to the article, what's new is that they've discovered how the angles of the hairs affect the attachment.
Summary: pull them away 30 degrees and they 'unstick'.
I didn't read the SciAm article, but I don't remember that part from the popular press last time 'round.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Your gecko wanders off and that hot chick's number is lost forever.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Because my systems make me have one.
:-)
I'd use a blank password if I could.
"Gecko Tape", did you say? .... wait until Red Green hears about this! ..... must sell my duct tape stock!
Wow
One small step for Geeks and Geckos, one giant leap for Red Green!
Gotta go now
That was the Sony DSC-F505; the F707 is better at focussing fast (but it's still the Achilles' heel of an otherwise fine camera, IMHO).
If you really want to see slow operation, set the thing for redeye-reduction plus noise correction and take a nightframing shot. <Press>... <Thunk> spung up flash... <flashity-flash-flash> the redeye bit... <flash>/<click> take the shot... <click> take the second blacked-out shot... process, process... you'd better not want a second shot of your subject.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing