Can I read The Gecko's Foot : How Scientists Are Taking a Leaf from Nature's Book on EtoBox?

The Gecko's Foot : How Scientists Are Taking a Leaf from Nature's Book by Peter Forbes is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Gecko's Foot : How Scientists Are Taking a Leaf from Nature's Book about?

A cutting-edge science book in the style of 'Fermat's Last Theorem' and 'Chaos' from an exciting and accessible voice in popular science writing. Bio-inspiration is a form of engineering but not in the conventional sense. Extending beyond our established and preconceived notions, scientists, architects and engineers are looking at imitating nature by manufacturing 'wet' materials such as spider silk or the surface of the gecko's foot. The amazing power of the gecko's foot has long been known – it can climb a vertical glass wall and even walk upside down on the ceiling – but no ideas could be harnessed from it because its mechanism could not be seen with the power of optical microscopes. Recently however the secret was solved by a team of scientists in Oregon who established that the mechanism really is dry, and that it does not involve suction, capillary action or anything else the lay person might imagine. Each foot has half a million bristles and each bristle ramifies into hundreds of finer spatula-shaped projections. The fine scale of the gecko's foot is beyond the capacity of conventional microengineering, but a team of nanotechnologists have already made a good initial approxi

Author

Peter Forbes

Publisher

HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Published

2010

Language

EN

ISBN

9780007405473

Subjects

Engineering, Stem

Rating

4 / 5 (23 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14