 - Last login: 11 hours agoIdleCycle
- idleCycle is a 26 year old single guy from Switzerland.
- Likes 4,853 pages, 134 videos, 348 photos • 435 fans • Received 61 reviews
- Member since Sep 24, 2005
"There's only one rule that I know of, babies - God damn it, you've got to be kind."
-- Kurt Vonnegut
Favorites » His Blog
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Gecko Tech | Popular Science
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Apr 5, 8:48am
1 review
•http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article...
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Originally, it was thought that a gecko's ability to cling to walls was due to a secretion of some sort of adhesive on the pads of their feet. But when scrutinized with modern high-power microscopes, the surface of a gecko's foot revealed hundreds of thousands of tiny hair-like projections, called setae, which can be as small as one tenth the diameter of a strand of human hair and are themselves covered in even smaller projections, called spatulae, which are sometimes so tiny as to be smaller than the wavelength of visible light. Each time one of these setae comes into contact with a surface, the tiny hairs form a temporary atomic bond called a van der Waals force. This molecular bonding is relatively weak, but when multiplied over thousands upon thousands of setae, it becomes quite potent - strong enough that if every single setae was bonded to a surface, a typical adult gecko could support nearly 300 pounds of weight.
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