slowly but surely We all make good use of the futuristic gadgets we imagined as children. Watch Penny Brown’s video Inspector Gadget? check. starfleet tricorder Star Trek? It’s almost there. But web shooting? Web sling? it wasn’t ours Really I thought it would be a crossover. And that wasn’t exactly in the plans of Marco Lo Presti of Tufts University’s Silk Lab, the scientist who made strong, sticky air-spun yarn a reality.
Back in 2020, Lo Presti, research assistant professor of biomedical engineering, was working on the challenge of underwater adhesives. The first material he chose to work with consisted of silk and dopamine, a popular combination because it mimics the way mussels cling to rock surfaces underwater, and is useful for other applications as well. Ta.
“As I was cleaning this silk and dopaminergic glassware using acetone, I noticed that it was changing into solid forms, web-like materials, and fiber-like things.” he says. I showed Fio the vial and immediately started thinking of ways to make remote adhesive. [a substance that sticks to an object from a distance] Get out of there. ”
Fio is Fiorenzo Omenetto, an engineering professor at Tufts University and the Silk Lab’s “puppeteer.” “I would like to say that every experiment is carefully planned based on equations and careful forethought, but the reality is that connections are key,” he says. “It’s like exploring and playing and connecting the dots. A very underrated part of this play is, ‘Wait a minute, is this like Spider-Man? “That’s what it says. You might ignore it at first, but material that mimics superpowers is always very good. ”
But before Lo Presti could turn his attention to these accidental webs, he needed to complete his work. paper Many of Silklab’s works are “biologically inspired” by spiders, silkworms, mussels, barnacles, velvet worm slime and even tropical orchids, and the team is exploring the potential applications of this sticky web. I am doing it. Doing something useful may seem like an easy side step for your team.
However, Professor Lo Presti said that while the new material does mimic spider silk, “spiders can’t shoot streams of solution that turn into fibers, allowing them to remotely capture objects at great distances.” I can’t do that,” he points out. This was new, at least for the real world.
However, according to the research paper, Advanced functional materials Notes – Enter a fictional character. In the original 1960s cartoon by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Amazing Fantasy #15Peter Parker built a “small device” that was fixed to each wrist and activated by finger pressure, producing a bundle of ejectable “spider webs”. By the mid-2000s Sam Raimi spiderman In the film, the web shoot switched from a wrist-worn spinneret gadget to an organic part of his transformation into a superhero.
