Everyone knows that distinctive ripping sound. It’s the noise you hear when a blood pressure cuff is taken off your arm, when someone opens a truck tarpaulin courier bag, or when the Velcro strap securing palettes is released. These hook-and-loop fasteners, super-easy to open and close, are found in many spheres – they even played their part in the 1969 moon landing. It’s a mechanism as simple as it is brilliant. And yet initially the prickly green burrs that came home in the fur of Swiss engineer George de Mestral’s hunting dog, after his forays in the natural world, were quite simply a nuisance. The burrs were burdock seedheads, designed to help the plant spread its seeds over distance. As an engineer, de Mestral wanted to get to the bottom of this phenomenon and find out what made the burrs cling on so effectively. A look through the microscope provided the answer: a multitude of tiny hooks on the surface allow the seedheads to attach themselves to passing animals. The hooks are elastic, so they don’t break even when roughly torn away from an animal’s fur, from fabric or from your own hair. De Mestral realized that this technique was transferrable and began to experiment; Velcro was duly born. It consists of one strip featuring an army of little elastic hooks (like those burrs) and another covered with fine loops. In October 1951, de Mestral filed for patent protection for Velcro, which was granted in 1954. Velcro was officially endorsed as new, inventive and capable of industrial application. And today it is a textbook example of bionics, i.e., technological developments drawing their inspiration from nature.