Summary draft 1

Gecko-inspired adhesive came out of Professor Mark Cutkosky’s lab in Stanford and is now marketed as geCKo Materials(Veritasium, 2023). Imagine a material that can seamlessly adhere to almost any surface, strong enough to hold your weight on a smooth wall yet gentle enough to leave no residue.geCKo Materials is inspired by the incredible way geckos can scale walls and even move about on the ceiling. According to (Hawkes, 2015), it mimics the gecko’s foot structure, allowing it to cling to almost any surface be it rough or smooth due to it being able to make close contact with the surface. This field is a rather young one as it was born out of discovering the mechanism of adhesion in the geckos in 2002, namely Van der Waals forces. Unlike how sticky tape works, where the tape sticks due to the chemicals found on one surface of the tape, gecko adhesive is a dry adhesive that is easy to remove without the use of force at all and it leaves no marks. Although it is currently impossible to replicate the intricate branching structure of a gecko’s foot, the tape uses a crude approximation of it.