If you’ve seen enough movies, you’ve seen soldiers climbing walls. What you might not have noticed is that they all seem to use the same technology, regardless of what era the film is set in. Whether it’s medieval, a western or a World War II film, all the climbing is done with some combination of ropes, hooks and ladders.

According to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), that will soon be changing. DARPA’s Z-man project uses the same technology that gecko lizards developed naturally. Using thousands of tiny, overlapping bristles called seta on its toes, a gecko can climb virtually any surface including glass. These bristles are so strong that the lizard can use a single toe to support its entire body.

“The gecko is one of the champion climbers in the Animal Kingdom, so it was natural for DARPA to look to it for inspiration in overcoming some of the maneuver challenges that U.S. forces face in urban environments. Like many of the capabilities that the Department of Defense pursues, we saw with vertical climbing that nature had long since evolved the means to efficiently achieve it. The challenge to our performer team was to understand the biology and physics in play when geckos climb and then reverse-engineer those dynamics into an artificial system for use by humans,” said Dr. Matt Goodman, the DARPA program manager for Z-Man, in a statement.

Of course humans weigh significantly more than lizards and it took scaling to achieve similar results for a human to be able to move either horizontally or vertically, while detaching and reattaching seta covered paddles with each step.

The results, however, appear to speak for themselves. In one test a 225 pound man, carrying a 50 pound load, was able to scale 25 feet of sheer glass. The gecko paddles, developed for DARPA by Draper Laboratory of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is just the latest example of the emerging science of biomimicry.

“Biomimicry (from bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate) is a new discipline that studies nature’s best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems,” according to a statement from the Biomimicry institute in Missoula, Montana.