Nanotubes: Stickier Than a Gecko

Thanks to their 'sticky' feet, colorful leopard geckos can walk up walls and hang from the ceiling by one toe.

But their feet aren't actually sticky. Each foot is covered with tiny elastic hairs called setae, each of which branches at the end into even tinier fibers called spatulas.

In fact, these tiny spatula-hairs are so small that they wedge between the atoms of the wall or ceiling and form molecular bonds with these surfaces. This is what makes a gecko's foot 'sticky.'

Now, scientists at the University of Akron have made something even stickier. Ali Dhinojwala and his colleagues have created a densely packed carpet of carbon nanotubes - tiny structures that imitate the gecko's foot hairs - that are 200 times stickier than a gecko's foot.

These artificial nanotubes may have future applications in fields like robotics, information technology, or space exploration.

The group's work was funded by the National Science Foundation and is reported in a recent issue of the journal Chemical Communications.

--Bjorn Carey

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