Science has sprung Spider-Man’s web-sling into reality

Slowly but surely, As kids, we are doing well on gadgets that we imagined. From Penny Brown’s video watch Inspector gadget? check out From Starfleet Tricoder Star Trek? almost there But web-shooting? Web-slinging? It was not one of us really Thought it would make a crossover. That didn’t exactly go according to plan for Marco Lo Presti, the scientist who made the strong, sticky air-spun web a reality, from Tufts University’s SilkLab.

In 2020, Lou Presti, research assistant professor of biomedical engineering, was working on the challenge of underwater adhesives. The first material he chose to work with was silk and dopamine, a popular combination because it mimics the way oysters cling to water—something that worked. Other applications.

“When using acetone to clean the glassware of this silk and dopamine substance,” he said, “I noticed that it was transforming into something that looked like a fiber in a stiff, web-looking material. I showed the vials to FIO and we immediately Let’s immediately start thinking about how to create a remote adhesive (a substance that sticks to an object from a distance).”

Fio is Fierenzo Omenetto, a professor of engineering at Tufts and the “puppy” of SilkLab. “We like to say that every test is rigorously planned with equations and lots of predictability, but it’s really about connectivity,” he says. “You explore and you play and you arrange the dots. The part of the play that is so underrated is where you say “Hey, wait a second, is this like the Spider-Man thing?” And you brush it off at first, but an element that mimics superpowers is always a very, very good thing.”

Before Lo Presti could turn his attention to these accidental meshes, however, he had to complete his paper in underwater adhesives using biomolecules, which he did in 2021. many many Work of Silklab There are “bio-inspired” by spiders and silkworms, oysters and barnacles, velvet worm slime, even tropical orchids—so working out whether this sticky web can become functional may seem like a simple side-step for the team.

However, Lo Presti noted that the new material mimics spider threads, “a spider is not able to shoot a stream of solution, which becomes a fiber and captures a distant object”. At least for the real world it was something new.

But as a research paper Advanced functional materials Notes – Enter fictional characters. In the original 1960s comic books by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, starting with Amazing fantasy #15Peter Parker developed a “small device”, strapped to each wrist and triggered by finger pressure, to create strands of ejectable ‘spider webs’. Sam Raimi in the mid-2000s spider man Films, Web-shooting has switched from a wrist-worn spinneret gadget to an organic part of his superhero transformation.