The large diversity of flora and fauna on this planet have all different stories to tell. All the stories have a moral we can take away something from. Scientists have been clever enough to realize this and, many new gadgets and inventions are inspired from the behaviour of a creature already found on the earth.

The latest example of this would be how gecko gave us an idea to use as extra-terrestrial adhesives. Velcro was the former preferred from of adhesion, but this system poses the problem of needing a “mating surface” to join with the Velcro base.

Geckos have countless tiny hairs on their feet which let them climb walls. These hair encrusted feet create van der Waal forces between the wall and the feet as they climb. A related NASA statement explains, “A slight electrical field is created because electrons orbiting the nuclei of atoms are not evenly spaced, so there are positive and negative sides to a neutral molecule. The positively charged part of a molecule attracts the negatively charged part of its neighbor, resulting in ‘stickiness.’”

Van der Waals forces are not affected by temperature, pressure, heat or rain, thus this is a full proof “gecko-gripper” system. NASA tested the adhesive they created with this logic and the technology was “able to stick to and manipulate a 10 kilogram cube and a 100 kilogram person.” Over 30,000 successful tests later, Aaron Parness of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory noted that with this new technology, “We might eventually grab satellites to repair them, service them, and we also could grab space garbage and try to clear it out of the way.”

[adinserter block=”7″]

Author:Technology Blog