Dude, I knew gecko feet had some amazing physical properties, but I didn't know they bent backward! Check this out:
The video is by John Stevens by way of Heather at Cabinet of Wonders.
(While writing this post, I got a little sad: someday YouTube will cease to work, and all YouTube links embedded in blog posts will be broken, and the posts will cease to be useful. The internet is too young to have accumulated much urban blight, but eventually a Google search is going to be choked by abandoned crap. That is, unless the Google of the future designs its engines to filter out old content, in which case old blogs will be nearly impossible to find - far harder to find than if we had a physical presence. Oh well. Never mind; carry on with the gecko feet.)
Did you watch the one of the other clips linked to this one about engineering inspired by nature, featuring a robot gecko? Coolness. The link also has a gecko foot for its leading image. The doco is about 11 minutes long and well worth watching all the way through.
yeah, I'd seen that gecko engineering stuff - actually I've been hearing about one of the labs working on it for a few years ( http://sciencereview.berkeley.edu/TOC4.php ). Call me weird, but I'm much more excited that the feet bend backward. ;)