Why the Gecko Doesn't Fall

A gecko can hang from a sheet of polished glass by one toe, using a force that chemists describe as negligible, between two surfaces that are not touching. Then it walks away, and the glass is clean.
For two thousand years the explanation was suction. Aristotle said so, and almost everybody agreed until somebody put a gecko in a vacuum chamber and it held on perfectly well. Then it was glue, which fails because there is no glue. Then static, then friction. The real answer took until the year 2000, and it turned out the gecko has no better adhesive than we do. It has the same weak force, divided into three hundred million pieces.
Why the Gecko Doesn't Fall takes twenty-four things an animal does that ought to be impossible and finishes each one with the mechanism. Not wonder: the measurement, the number, and, where the answer took a long time, the wrong answers people believed first.
Inside you will find:
- The punch that boils water at room temperature, and hits its prey twice
- Why the woodpecker's famous built-in shock absorber does not exist, and what high speed cameras measured instead in 2022
- The seashell that is ninety-five per cent chalk and three thousand times harder to break than chalk
- The spider that stays underwater for a day breathing out of a bubble that is not a store of air but a gill
- Why spider silk is not stronger than steel, and the thing it beats steel at by twenty-five times
- The strongest material ever measured in a living thing, which belongs to a snail on a rock in Cornwall
- The material in your own body that finds its own cracks and replaces them while you sleep
- And why there will never be a gecko the size of a man, which you can work out on the back of an envelope
Twenty-four short chapters, six full plates and nine hand drawn diagrams for the places where a picture says it better than a sentence. The book ends with a quiz and a page of sources.
It closes with an honest accounting: what engineers have actually copied from all this, what they have failed to copy, and why the failures are nearly always for the same reason.
For readers of Ed Yong and Steven Vogel, and for anyone who has ever watched something small do something it should not be able to do.
The Impossible Animal, Volume One.