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Scientists Discover What Makes Geckos Stick

Posted by timothy on Tue Aug 27, 2002 06:14 PM
from the persistence-alone-is-not-enough dept.
Science
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.
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[+] Scientists Developing Commercially Viable Synthetic Gecko 122 comments
Gordon from Seattle writes to mention a CNN article about a new way to hang out. A British aerospace team is working on a super-sticky substance they're calling "Synthetic Gecko". It mimics the hairs on a gecko's foot, and may eventually be developed as a reusable adhesive. From the article: "Each of the microscopic setae on a gecko's foot has a mushroom shaped cap on the end, less than one-thousandth of a millimeter across. This ensures that the gecko's foot is in very close contact with the surface beneath. The cumulative attractive force, called van der Waals force, of these setae allows the lizard to scurry up walls and ceilings, and even hang from polished glass surfaces. In 2003 scientists at the University of Manchester produced a one centimeter patch of 'gecko tape,' but neither the University of Manchester nor University of California teams managed to produce the material in a greater quantity, unlike Haq and Sargent, who have already tested areas larger than 10 centimeters-squared."
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  • Sponsored... (Score:5, Funny)

    by wo1verin3 (473094) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @06:19PM (#4152823) Homepage
    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......
    • Even sillier -- geckos are the only reptiles with a voice. Train them, and...

      I don't know about anybody else, but I'd have to be pretty tired before mere ordinary sticky notes start calling to me.

    • Re:Sponsored... (Score:5, Funny)

      by agentZ (210674) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @07:13PM (#4153158)
      If you draw on one, it becomes "art gecko".

    • I'd settle for a sticky note that sticks overnight, let alone one capable of holding 280 pounds.

      Nothing like having a busy day at the office, coming in the next day and having to sort a pile of stickies that were on your monitor and shelf...

  • Maybe not... (Score:3, Funny)

    by PopeAlien (164869) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @06:20PM (#4152828) Homepage Journal
    Boy! the mental picture of a gecko 'supporting' 280 pounds is not a pretty one. Poor little geckos..
  • 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?

  • What year is this? (Score:5, Informative)

    by theFlux (449414) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @06:21PM (#4152840) Journal
    Very timely... Read about this in Scientific American over a year ago! Takes awhile for scientific knowledge to disseminate I guess.....
    • I first noticed this on cnn's frontpage.

      Searched /. for "gecko" and showed me that this is old news (June 2000) found here [slashdot.org].

      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 [go.com] and this [bbc.co.uk]. 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.

  • So... (Score:5, Funny)

    by phraktyl (92649) <wyatt@@@draggoo...com> on Tuesday August 27 2002, @06:21PM (#4152841) Homepage Journal
    All I need to climb walls are hairy palms? I'll get right on that!

  • It's passive too... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Jaeden (24087) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @06:21PM (#4152843)
    One my profs works on geckos, he was telling me that even dead geckos stick to walls. Fun for the whole family!

  • old news (Score:5, Funny)

    by steve_l (109732) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @06:24PM (#4152868) Homepage
    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.

  • 280 lbs. (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheFlu (213162) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @06:24PM (#4152869) Homepage
    The 280 lb gecko they used for the experiment simply asked for more donuts when questioned about the validity of the scientists claims.
  • This is ancient - see The BBC [bbc.co.uk] for starters.

  • Reinventing the wheel (Score:5, Informative)

    by PD (9577) <slashdotlinux@pdrap.org> on Tuesday August 27 2002, @06:28PM (#4152899) Homepage Journal
    Why is everyone reporting this like it was just discovered?

    BBC covered it over two years ago. [bbc.co.uk]

    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.

  • My Gecko Story (Score:5, Interesting)

    by VividU (175339) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @06:32PM (#4152933)
    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 [goodskeleton.com] I took of my little buddy.
    • How about a pet store that sells crickets. It is in a strip mall. A pizza place 2 stores down starts complaining about the amount crickets around. Solution: Release 100 tokays. No more crickets, but still an odd chirping.
    • Didn't that produce a small gecko poo problem?
      • 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.
    • I had a tokay gecko. It was the best. We tethered it to a tree with a 100 foot string and it happly climbed the tree and ate bugs. It was fun. We had to be careful, because if you tie it around it's neck and it falls, it can die, so we made a little backpack for it that held the string. Once in a while, we would go out back and see a swinging gecko in the tree and we had to go rescue it.
      Ahh, those were the days...

  • Wait a minute! (Score:5, Funny)

    by ninejaguar (517729) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @06:34PM (#4152942)
    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!

    • They figured how Gecko's stick to glass surfaces, but they never figured out how they let go!

      I was wondering the same thing, actually. Anybody here got any idea?
      • I wonder if there's some way of applying a low-voltage charge that would lay the hairs flat, and release the grip.

        Imagine, if you will, a practical spidey-suit (hinted at in the CNN article). How would anyone with gloves like these be able to throw anything (like a pistol, say) out of his or her grasp?

        I mean, I'm just thinking here; not really interested in becoming a superhero or nothin'. Really. Nothing to see here. Move along. *koff*

      • that it has millions of hairs does not mean it has to let go all of them at at time.
        so my theory is it lets go hair by hair, in fast order -- like it automaticly does when it walks.
        if you take two-sided sticky tape and tape it to your soles it would be harder to lift your foot straight up than to just walk, wouldn't it?

      • Yes they did (Score:4, Informative)

        by mindstrm (20013) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @07:27PM (#4153234)
        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.

  • bbc and cnn (Score:3)

    by cheese_wallet (88279) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @06:36PM (#4152951) Journal
    The same scientist made the anouncment 2 years ago, although one of the articles gets his name backwards. At the BBC [bbc.co.uk] they call him Autumn Kellar, and at CNN [cnn.com] they call him Kellar Autumn. I don't know which way is backwards.
  • I want to cling to hot classmates celings!
  • 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.
    • 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 [chemguide.co.uk].

      • Re:So why can't I do it? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Christopher Thomas (11717) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @09:26PM (#4153761)
        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?

        If I understand correctly, it's because the hairs and pads are arranged so that the sticky pads can follow surface curvature down to a near-molecular level.

        Most surfaces, even ones that are polished smooth, are very rough on a small scale. This roughness is actually fractal; it's not just one level of coarseness (like sandpaper), it's coarseness on many scales. Match it on one scale, and the next step finer still keeps most of the surface away from you.

        So, if you put your finger on a surface, you're still not touching much of the surface, even if you press quite hard. This limits the amount of van der Waals adhesion you can get (as the effect happens over molecular distances).

        A thin film of water or oil can fill the crevases and make the bonding much stronger, if you want to try sticking your fingers to things. Don't try hanging off the ceiling, though :).

        Disclaimer: This explanation could be completely wrong. It's just the most plausible one I can think of.

  • Applications other than climbing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by StefanJ (88986) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @06:50PM (#4153036) Homepage Journal
    * 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!
    • 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.)

      Great.. kids already run on walls, now they'll be on the ceiling too!
  • What's this? Mozilla climbs walls now?
    Time to get a new nightly build!

    (Yes, I'm aware Gecko is just the rendering engine! :)

  • What about... (Score:3, Funny)

    by ocie (6659) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @06:55PM (#4153065) Homepage
    How to stick turtles to the ceiling?

  • Obligatory Mastercard bit (Score:5, Funny)

    by jcsehak (559709) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @07:04PM (#4153117) Homepage
    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.

  • "Why now?" answered... (Score:5, Informative)

    by RandomCoil (88441) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @07:45PM (#4153317)
    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 [pnas.org] to the Autumn, et al. article, entitled "Evidence for van der Waals adhesion in gecko setae".

  • Gekko experiments you can do... (Score:4, Funny)

    by tlambert (566799) on Tuesday August 27 2002, @08:14PM (#4153421)
    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 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.
      • I'm well enough aware of the Van Der Walls effect, thanks for the offer of the slide show though.
        As for my response to the article, guess I just managed to miss the initial release of the info. Sorry, I actually have a life and spend most of my time living it, rather than reading stuff that rarely pertains to me. You might try it, its kinda fun.

        • This was actually directed to the parent article, not necessarily to you in vain -- it was the first post that remotely related to what I was going to say, so I replied. As for the presentation, it didn't just casually mention "van der Waals forces" --- it had two slides that were specifically talking about the gecko... in fact, it had the exact same picture that is on CNN (the Gecko hanging upside down).

          Oh wait, here it is. [purdue.edu] Last page, slides 17 and 18, check it out (in MSWord format w/ embedded pictures). This was written 8 months ago.

          Like I said, this doesn't seem to be much of a "revolutionary discovery" any more, does it? :-)

    • Yup. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mindstrm (20013)
      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..
    • 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 [fdns.net] at Wyloo [fdns.net] Station [fdns.net] during a trip in June 2000, and this article [answersingenesis.org] was published in December 2000, referring to papers and articles from June 2000.

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