slowly but surely, We're making good on the gadgets we imagined, as kids, that the future would hold. From Penny Brown's Video Watch Inspector Gadget? check. from Starfleet tricoder Star Trek? There approx. But web-shooting? Web-slinging? he was not the one In fact Thought that crossover. And that wasn't exactly in the plans for the scientist who made strong, sticky air-spun web a reality, Marco Lo Presti from Tufts University's SilkLab.
Back in 2020, Lo Presti, a research assistant professor in biomedical engineering, was working on the challenge of underwater adhesion. The first material they chose to work on was made of silk and dopamine, a popular combination because it mimics the way that mussels stick tenaciously to rock surfaces in water – something that proved useful. Is Other Applications,
“While using acetone to clean the glassware of this silk and dopamine substance,” he says, “I noticed that it was undergoing a transition from a solid format, to a web-looking one.” I showed FIO the vials, in something that looked like a fiber, and we immediately started thinking about how we could make a remote adhesive. [a substance that sticks to an object from a distance] Out of it.”
Fio is Fiorenzo Ommenato, a professor of engineering at Tufts and the “puppeteer” of SilkLab. “We'd like to say that every experiment is painstakingly planned with equations and lots of forethought, but it's really about connections,” he says. “You explore and you play and you connect the dots. One part of the play that is very underrated is the one where you say “Hey, wait a second, is this like a Spider-Man?” And you brush it off at first, but a material that mimics superpowers is always a great thing. ,
Before Lo Presti could turn his attention to these accidental traps, however, he had to complete his paper Underwater adhesives using biomolecules, which they did in 2021. silklab work It's “bio-inspired” by spiders and silkworms, mussels and barnacles, velvet worm slime, even tropical orchids—so if this sticky web could be useful for something, it's like a handy side-step for the team. It may take.
However, Lo Presti points out that while the new material mimics spider threads, “to shoot a stream of solution, one is not able to take out the spider, which turns into a fiber and emits a long-lasting effect.” Performs remote capturing of the object”. This was something new, at least for the real world.
but as a research paper advanced functional materials Notes -Enter fictional characters. In Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's original 1960s comic books, starting with Amazing Fantasy #15Peter Parker creates a “small device”, one fastened to each wrist and triggered by finger pressure, which produces strands of a 'spider web'. Sam Raimi until the mid-2000s spider man movies, web-shooting made the switch from a wrist-worn spinneret gadget an organic part of his superhero transformation.