Geckos can climb smooth surfaces, including vertical glass, due to the van der Waals forces between these tiny hairs on their footpads and the surface. (Image: Emily Kane) The determination of boiling ...

Gecko feet have microscopic flaps that stick to surfaces because of Van der Waals forces. [Mark Cutkosky] and his team’s adhesive works similarly, adhering to surfaces only when applied in a ...

Those pads, called spatulae, get so close to the surfaces on which a gecko moves, the electrons of the spatulae and those on the surface start to sync up. That dance is called Van der Waals force ...

No, it’s none of those things. The answer has to do with chemistry! The gecko sticks with temporary attractive forces between molecules called Van der Waals forces. They are easily formed and broken ...

At such a scale, the attractive forces between molecules, called van der Waals forces, become significant. These forces are very weak, but because the combined area of interaction is large, they allow ...

Van der Waals forces, once deemed too weak for structural integrity, have been shown to create stable, highly porous frameworks with exceptional thermal resilience and reversible assembly ...

For the development of van der Waals thin films with high electronic performance, mechanical stretchability, and permeability for highly flexible, adaptable and breathable bioelectronic membranes. The ...

The best description of this material inspired by gecko feet would be this video, also from the Stanford BDML lab. It’s a neat material that we’ll probably find in Post-It notes in a decade ...

Van der Waals heterostructures are engineered by stacking different van der Waals materials in a controlled sequence, allowing the creation of new materials with tailored properties. This technique ...