...your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Or woman. Whatever. From The Globe and Mail:

Gecko feet are covered with millions of tiny setae, hairs only twice as long as a strand of human hair is wide. Each seta has 1,000 tiny pads on its tip, a tip that is so small it is below the wavelength of visible light, only 200 billionths of a metre wide.

Studying the Tokay gecko, a native of Southeast Asia and one of about 800 species of the lizard, the team believed that it was the size and shape of the foot hairs that determined a gecko's ability to adhere to a surface, not what the hairs were made of. They then used that knowledge to create synthetic foot-hairs from two different substances.

"Both ... stuck as predicted," says lead researcher Kellar Autumn, assistant biology professor at Oregon's Lewis & Clark College. "Our results provide the first direct experimental verification that ... van der Waals force is definitely what makes geckos stick."

Oh, and I'm not the only one:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the central research and development organization for the Pentagon, has supported the research, though it has not revealed any plans it might have for it.

DARPA: yesterday the world wide web, tomorrow the spiderweb!

[via Boing Boing, by way of Craig]

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