One of the participating tokay geckos. Photo: Ethan Knapp and
Alyssa Stark  I love a good gecko story, and I love how the cute
little critters can climb up most things but would apparently
struggle with my non-stick frying pan. Now I’ve found out that
if my frying pan was still wet from the washing up Mr Gecko
would have a better chance of holding on.  There is a serious
side to this science. Hundreds of systems have been developed
mimicking the adhesive power of gecko toes and all rely on
creating a large surface area that can get in contact with
whatever surface you want to stick to using van de Waals forces
to do the rest. Understanding how different surfaces affect
adhesion is obviously important and it’s been anecdotally known
for a while that as well as struggling with Teflon, geckos can’t
stick to wet glass despite their feet being superhydrophobic. In
rainforests, things can get quite wet so how do the geckos
manage?  To test this out Alyssa Stark‘s lab at the University
of Akron, Ohio, placed geckos