Here’s a scientific breakthrough that will have you climbing the walls. Scientists are replicating the minuscule toe hairs that allow geckos to move in any direction on walls and ceilings.

Carnegie Mellon Engineering Professor Metin Sitti has created some polymer-based hair on a nano scale, which can hold a few kilograms to the ceiling. Gecko hairs stick to most surfaces because of “van der Waals” forces. These are positive and negative charges between the gecko’s toe hair molecules and surface molecules which make them act as mini-magnets. But it’s the geometry of the hairs (each toe has two million hairs, each split into perhaps 1,000 tiny branches) that creates the adhesion, not chemistry.

This is allowing nanotechnologists to create replicas that actually stick. While Sitti’s hair arrays won’t yet hold an adult human aloft, they’re getting closer.

Sitti envisions that the gecko hairs could be used in the manufacturing of clothing with pockets that can be removed or repositioned; athletic shoes and car tires with unusual grip; surgical sutures, implants, wigs and toupees that stay put; and tools for astronauts in space.

Sitti, who is also affiliated with the Robotics Institute, also believes that the synthetic hairs could be used for robots that can crawl on the skin of space shuttles for inspection or repair during flight, and for future surgical and wall-climbing robots. The possibilities are endless.

Goodbye, gravity boots.