Geckos are lizards that can run rapidly up walls and even upside down on polished glass. I wanted to find out.
Gecko have millions of microscopic hairs on the bottom of their feet that function as an adhesive.
Biologists have been asking this question for over a hundred years. These tiny setae are only as long as 2 diameters of a human hair. That's 100 millionths of a meter long. Each seta ends in up to 1000 even tinier tips. We used a microscopic force sensor designed by Tom Kenny at Stanford to measure the tiny forces of adhesion of the gecko seta.