Geckos feet can stick to almost any surface while remaining mysteriously clean of dirt and sand. “In fact we found that they get cleaner and cleaner with repeated use,” explains Kellar Autumn, from Lewis and Clark University.

Their feet stick because of the van der Waals forces —attractive forces between the molecules in gecko feet and the molecules of the surface they adhere to. The molecules attract each other like magnets and since gecko toes are covered with 2 million hairs, and each hair splits into 100 to 1,000 tiny branches, the number of mini magnets is immense.

The same mechanism also helps the lizards keep dirt off their feet. While those millions of hairs combined create enough force for climbing walls, the force created by just the few hairs that would touch any single piece of dirt is too weak, so the dirt falls off. In other words, geckos’ feet are self-cleaning.

Scientists are now working on synthetic gecko hairs that could be used to make an extra-strong, clean and re-usable new adhesive.

Patches of gecko adhesive would be used for Post-it or waterproof Band-Aids that don’t cause kids pain when you pull them off, for rock climbing, etc. Since the process works in a vacuum, there could also find applications in outer space. And because synthetic gecko hairs would be so small, they might also be used in nano-surgery.

Such products won’t be available for years, since creation of the synthetic hairs is still in the early stages of development.

Via ScienCentral.