Media appearances

2008

Apart from its ability to hawk car insurance, the gecko has gained renown for its skills as a climber. It can ascend vertical walls and even walk across ceilings, courtesy of its sticky feet.
But the gecko is far from a perfect climber; it can slip at times. And when it does, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, report in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it uses its tail to help recover.
When a Sticky Gecko Starts to Slip, Its Tail Comes to the Rescue, New Yord Times. Click here to read full article...

High-speed video reveals that the creature uses its tail as a "fifth leg" to prevent it from slipping as it climbs wet surfaces.
And the footage shows that if it does fall, a flick of the tail is all it takes for the gecko to land feet-down.
The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, said the discovery could aid the development of improved climbing robots and unmanned gliding vehicles.
A gecko's tail is as crucial to the animal's acrobatic ability as its "sticky" feet, scientists report. BBC News. Click here to read full article...

How useful is an animal's tail? For the gecko, unlike most animals, it could be a matter of life or death, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley.
In a paper appearing this week in the online early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, UC Berkeley biologists report that geckos rely on their tails to keep from falling off vertical surfaces and, if they do fall, to right themselves in midair and maneuver like a skydiver gliding to a safe landing.
Gecko's tail key to preventing falls, aerial maneuvers. Berkeley News. Click here to read full article...

2006

Real geckos skitter up walls, thanks to millions of tiny hairs on the bottom of each toe. These hairs, called setae, cling fast as the creature pulls up, then gently detach when it's time to take the next step. Such was the inspiration for Stickybot, a mechanical lizard with its own adhesive feet. The hundreds of sharply tapered synthetic fibers that pad the bot's four appendages replicate the gecko's fancy footwork, including an elegant toe-curl release, to climb glass, tile or whiteboard at a rate of 4 cm/sec
Click here to read full article...

© Copyright Time Magazine, 2006

April 2006

The Spinybot, developed by mechanical engineer Mark Cutkosky, a professor at Stanford University in California, takes its cue from nature and employs tiny hairs on its toes to scale walls made of concrete, stucco and brick.
—Tiny Bot Walks on Walls, Discovery Channel

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February 2005

Biologist Robert Full shares his fascination with spiny cockroach legs that allow them to scuttle at full speed across loose mesh and gecko feet that have billions of nano-bristles to run straight up walls. His talk, complete with wonderful slow-mo video of cockroach, crab and gecko gaits, explains his goal of creating the perfect robotic distributed foot.
—TED.com, February 2005

August 2002

In the movie Spider-Man, Peter Parker looks down at the palms of his hands to find that they have sprouted thick, black hairs, giving him a firm grip on walls and ceilings. A growing body of evidence indicates that gecko lizards, too, cling to surfaces with the help of hairlike projections. The gecko hairs are so tiny, however, that they operate not by catching on substrate irregularities, but by facilitating the formation of molecular bonds that create electrodynamic attraction between the gecko's feet and the surface upon which it is walking. As a result, the charismatic creatures can crawl upside down even on polished glass.

Previous research, conducted by Kellar Autumn of Lewis and Clark College and his colleagues, had suggested that the gecko's foot-hairs, or setae, stick to surfaces by virtue of these so-called van der Waals forces. But the team had been unable to reject a competing hypothesis, which holds that the adhesion arises from water-based forces. The new work, detailed in a report published online this week by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, disproves that theory.
Click here to read full article...

© Copyright Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2002

August 2002

Geckos, nature's supreme climbers, can race up a polished glass wall at a meter per second and support their entire body weight from a wall with only a single toe. But the gecko's remarkable climbing ability has remained a mystery since Artistotle first observed it in the fourth century B.C.



Now a team of biologists and engineers has cracked the molecular secrets of the gecko's unsurpassed sticking power—opening the door for engineers to fabricate prototypes of synthetic gecko adhesive.
Click here to read full article...