Oh really hyke? small world, as they say.
Ever seen (or on TV) the likes of geckos running straight up smooth surfaces like glass?
That apparently is due to their feet having a microstructure of ridges or plates, covered in tiny tiny hairs, to maximize the surface area, and allow them to use the usually weak van der Waals bonding between the surface of the foot and whatever it is they are running up to keep them in place. You can get tape, now I think that works the same way, without adhesive on it, that can be peeled off and reused several times at least, until it loses sufficient of the artificial setae (the miniscule hairlike attractive protrusions)
And seemingly its self-cleaning too, because there are only a handful of setae that bond to any one dirt particle due to spatial constraints, which result in the energy barrier for dissociation from the hair tips being greater than that anchoring the dirt, dust etc. upon the surface. Didn't realize, but seemingly now we are even managing through the use of nanotech to make something similar which will stick to teflon, which is otherwise very, very difficult to make anything attach to, other than by means of brute-force, such as interlocking separate structures, like a pair of chain-links etc. or screw threads. I use teflon stopcocks for things like separatory funnels, which have a screw thread, nut and washer on the other side to lock them in place with tension, so as to be able to separate more or less anything that the glass will tolerate, and its damn near impossible to stick anything to them, which means they are great when it comes to cleaning the things. And for heping to keep air out of things like alkali metals stored dry, in just plastic packets without oil, at least until you need to open and use the packet. I just store the packs in glass jars after displacing the air with argon, and with a mixture of a dessicant outside the plastic bags but within the jars and some magnesium powder to absorb any oxygen, or some other sacrificial oxygen absorbent like iron powder to remove the last traces of O2 and H2O.
And then wrap a little teflon plumbing tape round the screw threads, and the jars are still easy to open but for example, so far, I've had what would doubtless be a slowly air-permeable plastic bag, heat-sealed, in a container like that containing lithium metal, in the form of square panels about just under 4mm thick and it hasn't oxidized visibly in months and months of storage, a lot less messy than storage under oil or high-boiling petroleum distillate-type solvents. In comparison, a piece of sodium-calcium alloy under naphtha produced by electrolysis DOES look less shiny, and with traces of hydroxides or oxide/peroxide/superoxide or whatever it is on the surface, when using a jar with just a rubberized seal and a plug type stopper (my grandmother's spice rack at one point, since the spices were old and my father wasn't going to be using them, I comandeered the rack and bottles for reagent storage, and the alkali metal/calcium alloy (Ca metal isn't violently reactive, on its own, but it does rapidly oxidize in air and should be stored under inert atmosphere or under oil/high boiling petroleum spirit or similar inert solvent, and it bubbles away to nothing, well, to Ca(OH)2, slaked lime, in H2O with hydrogen release, a lot faster than magnesium does in solid form, but I've never actually seen it catch fire in water.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_setae Thats how the geckos do it, and how we are improving on the original.
