The New Velcro

Leonard Duffy “slidingly engaging fasteners” link up easily and silently, don’t wear down over time, and support eight times the weight that the stuff on your jacket can with plastic straps that bind together through matching, interlocking grids of little hexagonal or triangular islands. Duffy has used them to replace the laces on sneakers and the straps on ski gloves and wristwatches and to seal a breathable, waterproof cast he calls the Unitary Wrap.
All these because he is fedup with his broken zipper and problems with his sister-in-law’s cast for her broken arm made him reinvent the velcro.

Each plastic strap consists of an alternating series of 1/8-inch-wide perforations and small islands that can be almost any geometric shape. To bind two together, you line up the islands on one with the gaps on the other and snap them tight.

Extract from Popular Science