It is a scene film buffs in the UAE are well familiar with: Tom Cruise dangling from Burj Khalifa as he struggles to remain stuck on to the world's tallest building with just a pair of high-tech gloves.
Brad Bird, the director behind this scene for Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, has noted in interviews that while the gloves do not exist - yet - they are grounded in reality. They were inspired by a lizard: the gecko.
A little more than a decade ago, Kellar Autumn, now a biology professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, helped uncover that the size and shape of a gecko's foot hairs - and not what they are made of - determine stickiness and allows them to adhere to smooth surfaces such as polished glass. The finding has inspired numerous researchers since then, as well as some Hollywood pros who worked on the latest Mission: Impossible flick.
"They called me up asking about what would it take to make gecko gloves," says Mr Autumn.
"Of course they got it wrong," he adds.
"Still, points for trying."
For years, many academics wondered how geckos were able to scale pretty much anything, going all the way back to the 4th Century BC, when Aristotle observed one of the creatures climb up a wall. But the secrets being unlocked by scientists these days could have a profound impact on glues, tapes and other products created by the global adhesives manufacturing sector.
Or so gecko-obsessed researchers hope, anyway.
Concepts that could come to fruition, according to proponents, include adhesives for medical applications, fumble-free football goalkeeping gloves and Spider-Man-like climbing gloves. Other ideas include building super-agile robots able to complete difficult rescue operations.
The benefits of gecko-inspired materials, researchers note, would include a longer shelf life and better sticking properties than conventional adhesives.
Not necessarily stronger, like superglue, but the ability to stick then re-stick many times even after being pulled off a picture frame or wall, for instance.
The case for this latter example started being made after Mr Autumn helped prove gecko setae - or hairs - are self-cleaning and can make multiple contacts with dry surfaces. And the finding may eventually have major implications if products are ever designed for use in the Middle East: "You can gunk these gecko tapes with all sorts of sand and dirt and they clean themselves," says Mr Autumn.
"This is not just the glue of the future but the screw of the future as well," he adds.
Yet Radia Amari, an industry analyst with IBISWorld, points out gecko-inspired technology has not yet been commercialised within the adhesives sector. In other words, its precise business potential is unknown.
"The industry remains in a mature stage of its life cycle because of an absence of significant product development," says Ms Amari.
"But, that said, [there are] gecko-based adhesives and other types of adhesives that are in the R&D stage," she adds. "Over the next five years, those technologies will be able to be put into commercial use. That'll definitely drive industry demand."
Behind the scenes, academic researchers have been meeting with all sorts of adhesive manufacturers, including the makers of different glues, tapes and even speciality sports clothes, in an attempt to transform science into actual products for store shelves.
In the United States alone, revenues for adhesive manufactures hit US$10 billion (Dh36.72bn) last year, with companies such as 3M, the Dow Chemical Company and PPG Industries dominating this sector.
The industry is forecast to grow an average of 3 per cent each year through to 2017 as demand for adhesives increases on the back of rising home, automobile and airplane production, according to a market research released last year by IBISWorld.
But some academics who have homed in on the gecko are struggling to get their research funded by commercial enterprises, because of the time it takes to develop new products for the market and increased wariness on the part of companies since the economic crisis of 2008.
However, this has not stopped individuals from advancing work within their own research labs. Mark Cutkosky, an engineering professor at Stanford University, has led researchers in the creation of a series of motorised robots. One of them - StickyBot - is shaped somewhat like a gecko and can move vertically.
Mr Cutkosky turned to the gecko to find a technique that would allow his robots to scuttle up smooth surfaces such as glass and metal. Previously, the machines could only conquer rougher materials such as brick or concrete walls, according to a recent article in the Stanford News.
At UC Berkeley, researchers are trying to harness different features of animals, including the gecko, to improve the way robots move and manipulate objects, among other tasks.
One of their projects involves "incorporating gecko adhesives on dynamic climbing robots," says Ron Fearing, a professor at UC Berkeley's department of electrical engineering and computer sciences.
Both Mr Fearing and Mr Cutkosky have written papers together, along with Mr Autumn.
In 2009, research centred on duplicating the sticky qualities of gecko feet, which was once conducted at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, spun off into a venture called nanoGriptech.
The company now leverages in-house research and development facilities that include a chemistry laboratory and prototyping space, as well as a computer workstation to run numerical simulations.
One video posted on nanoGriptech's site shows a humanoid robot turning the individual pages of a book, relying on hands with sticky fingertips.
Another features a tiny robot that climbs on the floor, up a wall then on to a second wall before crawling across the ceiling.
Overall, the company's aim is to mass-produce adhesive materials that could be used by individual consumers or industrial manufacturers, or perhaps even in medical and defence organisations.
"We don't have a product in the market yet but certain products are close to coming to market," says Metin Sitti, a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon and the founder and chief executive of nanoGriptech.
For researchers, the journey from that eureka! moment to market with a tangible product is as long and winding as the tail of a, well, you get the point.
Mr Autumn first stumbled into this field when it sort of stumbled upon him - in the late 1990s, during a vacation with his wife in Hawaii. Back then he had been looking at insects as a model for creating climbing robots. It was not until he wound up in bed in a little cabin on the Big Island - and saw a gecko scamper across the ceiling and take down a monstrous spider - that the lizard became his new academic muse.
"That just got me to wondering: how is it the gecko can run upside down on the ceiling, as if it's on level ground, and why is it better at doing this than the spider?"
And that, for Mr Autumn, is where it all began.