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The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Adhesive Tape (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: You take tape for granted, but it's truly an engineering wonder. For instance, Scotch Magic tape exhibits triboluminescence; it will generate a bit of bluish light when coming off the roll in a darkened room. It emits X-Rays if unrolled in a vacuum. But this common tape is just the tip of the iceberg. Nava Whiteford looks at lab uses of many different types of tape. Kapton tape is thermally stable and non-conductive. Carbon tape is conductive but resistive. That moves into the non-resistive and more niche tape types. There's a tape for every function. This instant and non-messy way to connect two things together has a lot of science behind it, as well as ahead of it in experimentation, manufacturing, and of course household use.
Luckily, with tato, mutfruit, corn and clean water you can mix your own.
One special quality of Duck Tape I learned about recently is its ability to be vulcanized. Several surfers I know expose the glued side to an open flame (such as the one from a cigarette lighter) before applying it, and it would hold on to whatever you stick it, even under water. You could even enhance its stickyness by applying more heat once you taped it.