Via DVice

What can support up to 4,000 times it’s own weight, withstand blasts of dynamite, and is used by NASA to collect comet dust?

If you guessed aerogel, you are correct!

Aerogel is one of the cooler synthetic substances that science has to offer. It was actually only invented in 1930, and only came into existence as the result of a bet between two chemists: Samuel Stephens Kistler and Charles Learned.

Many great pranks have been pulled over time using adhesives; duck taping a friend to a bed, gluing coins to a floor, and sticking a ‘kick me’ sign on someone’s back. Unfortunately, pranksters worldwide have been limited by scotch and duct tapes’ elementary adhesive abilities or superglues’ longer than comfortable effects. Fortunately, scientists have been hard at work developing a sticky alternative that will change the way we prank and the way we live our lives. They’re calling it GeckSkin.