Gecko lizard

Intermolecularforces play a myriad of roles in life and in the world around us. Intermolecular forces hold together the strands of our DNA, provide structure to our cell membranes, cause the feet of gecko lizards to stick to walls and... 

Sun W, Neuzil P, Kustandi TS, Oh S, Samper VD. (2005) The Nature of the Gecko Lizard Adhesive Force. Biophys J Biophys Lett%9 L14-L17. 

Dry adhesion of hierarchical fibrillar structures in gecko lizards... 

Smeets, W.J.A.J., J. Perez-Clausell, and F.A. Geneser. 1989. The distribution of zinc in the forebrain and midbrain of the lizard Gekko gecko. Anat. Embryol. 180 45-56. 

Geckos are lizard-like creatnres that can scamper up walls and hang from ceilings. Whether the surface is made from wood, metal, or glass, the gecko can climb it. What enables the gecko to do this Is it glne, snction, or a thin film of water None of these, as it turns out. 

Geckos are tiny lizards that can easily climb vertical walls and hang from the ceiling by a single toe. 

Fig. 1. Chondrodactylus tumeri scaling a vertical rock surface in Namibia, southern Africa. The rock surface is macroscopically rough and the lizard is able to scale it with the use of setal fields alone. The lack of claws ably demonstrates the astounding capabilities of the gecko effect.

In the hairy attachment system of the gekkonid lizards, van der Waals interactions are responsible for the generation of attractive forces (Hiller 1968 Autumn et al. 2000, 2002). Experiments, in which the force-displacement curves were determined for individual spatulae by atomic force microscopy, show that these smallest elements of the gecko s attachment system generate forces of about 10 nN O Fig. 54.5). An estimate of adhesion energy (y)... 

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