Geckos, as you most likely have observed at one point or another in your life, have an insect-like ability to cling to solid surfaces with relative ease thanks to microscopic hairs on the pads of their feet that do not wear off after repeated use —in other words, once a sticky gecko, always a sticky gecko.
With this concept in mind, JPL engineer Aaron Parness and his team created a material imbued with synthetic hairs thinner than a human hair that adhere to the desired surface when force is applied, without the requiring a mating surface such as Velcro. The underlying physics that permits this feat is dictated by a phenomenon called the van der Waals forces.
