Want to climb tall buildings or structures effortlessly and without any ropes to help you assist you? How about harnessing the natural abilities of a gecko, and reproducing it to fit into a suit that you can wear?? A professor at UC Berkeley has invented a tape-like substance that has so much adhesive strength that a person clothed in such a sticky suit could conceivably scale a building. Electrical engineer Ronald Fearing has based his invention on the same molecular trick that enables geckos to scoot across ceilings upside-down. and while it may be a long time, if ever, before this so-called smart gecko tape turns humans into wall-crawlers, Fearing says this technology could be used to make non slip shoe soles or bandages that cling to the skin but peel away without the ouch. The technology behind it is awe-inspiring consisting of clouds of molecules. Although our eyes perceive objects as solid, they actually are a cloud of molecules. As Autumn explained, whenever two materials come together - say your hand to a wall - each molecular structure exerts a weak electro-dynamic pull on the other. We can't feel this with our hand because it is too large. But the hairs on a gecko's toes are small enough that these weak attractions, called van der Waals forces, begin to matter. These insights are several years old, and for some time scientists at universities around the world have been creating prototype tools or devices that imitate gecko locomotion. One prominent example is Stickybot, the window-crawling mechanism created by Stanford researchers led by mechanical engineer Mark Cutkosky. The Berkeley researchers took a sheet of plastic of the same sort used to make milk jugs. Atop this plastic sheet they laid a filter, kind of like a window screen. They baked this screen into the plastic the way you might iron a decal onto a shirt. They then dissolved the screen to leave behind what would appear, under a microscope, as a densely packed forest of plastic bristles, each about one-hundredth of the diameter of a human hair. Medical applications in skin redressing are obvious.

Well if you're thinking on the lines of Spiderman like abilities but merely being able to stick around doesn't make you fight like him! Besides the technology is years away from bearing fruit.

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