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Science has made Spidey’s web a reality

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Science has made Spidey's web a reality

Slowly but surely, We are taking advantage of the devices that we imagined, as children, that the future would hold for us. Watch video of Penny Brown from Inspector Gadget? Check. The Starfleet tricoder Trip to the stars? We’re almost there. But shooting webs? Web slinging? That wasn’t one of us In fact I thought I would do the crossover. And it wasn’t exactly in the plans of the scientist who made the strong and sticky network woven with air a reality, Marco Lo Presti, from the Silklab at Tufts University.

In 2020, Lo Presti, a research assistant professor in biomedical engineering, was working on the underwater adhesive challenge. The first material he chose to work with was composed of silk and dopamine, a popular combination because it mimics the way mussels adhere firmly to rock surfaces in water, something that has proven useful in other applications.

“As I was using acetone to clean the glassware of this silk-dopamine substance,” he says, “I realized that I was experiencing a transition to a solid format, to a web-like material, to something that looked like a fiber. I showed the vials to Fio and we immediately started thinking about how we could make a remote adhesive (a substance that sticks to an object at a distance) from them.”

Fio is Fiorenzo Omenetto, engineering professor at Tufts and Silklab “puppeteer.” “We’d like to say that each experiment is carefully planned with equations and a lot of forethought, but really it’s about connection,” he says. “You explore, you play and you connect the dots. Part of the play that is very underrated is when you say “hey, wait a second, this is like a Spider-Man thing?” And at first you ignore it, but a material that imitates superpowers is always a very, very good thing.”

However, before Lo Presti could turn his attention to these accidental networks, he had to complete his paper on underwater adhesives using biomolecules, which it did in 2021. Much of Silklab’s work is “bioinspired” by spiders and silkworms, mussels and barnacles, velvetworm slime, and even tropical orchids, so finding out if this sticky web could become something useful may seem like an easy step for the team.

However, Lo Presti points out that although the new material imitates spider threads, “there is no spider capable of expelling, of shooting a jet of solution, which becomes a fiber and captures a distant object at a distance.” This was something new, at least for the real world.

But as the research work in Advanced functional materials Notes: Enter fictional characters. In the original Stan Lee and Steve Ditko comics from the 1960s, beginning with Amazing fantasy #15Peter Parker builds a “small device”, one attached to each wrist and activated by finger pressure, to produce strands of ejectable “spider webs”. In the mid-2000s, Sam Raimi spider man In the movies, the web shoot went from a row device worn on the wrist to an organic part of his superhero transformation.

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