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Spiders Ingest Nanotubes, Then Weave Silk Reinforced with Carbon
- tehchromic 12y agoI don't know if it's a function of thickness, or if they've beaten these researchers to the punch, but black widow spiders spin by far the strongest thread I have ever encountered. There's never any doubt when I encounter a black widow web, and that's how I know to proceed with caution, when I'm working in my garage on the next Google haha.
- devindotcom 12y agoThey might be twining multiple threads (each themselves consisting of multiple strands) together to make an especially strong dragline or something. The giant riverine orb spider is on record as making the strongest thread, but that might be under certain conditions (like what comes out of the spinnerette (sp?), no weaving allowed) or the like.
- EGreg 12y agoAre you able to break their spidereb with your hands?
- thaumasiotes 12y agoThis isn't something I'd be willing to try, for a black widow web...
- marcosdumay 12y agoAt Brazil we have a related (and extremely creepy - have you ever seen a spiders swarm?) but harmless species. Yes, one can break its web with the hands, but not without a conscious effort.
- EGreg 12y agoSo it doesnt just come apart like normal spiderwebs? I imagine breaking carbon nanotubes with bare hands...
- devindotcom 12y agoI just wrote this up myself. The results are remarkable, but the credit seems entirely due to the spiders. Well, not entirely, but the data is so limited! They only got a handful of spiders, from the lab's back yard essentially, and a bunch of them died from nanomaterial exposure, malnutrition, or both after 1 trial! Yet despite the bargain bin trappings, the results are so incredibly cool! The spiders just... incorporated carbon nanotubes and graphene into their silk-spinning process? What?! What's the mechanism?! No one knows! Who would have guessed this would work? It sounds like a joke experiment they cooked up while waiting for the glassware to bake! Hopefully a more rigorous study replicating and expanding on these results will appear. But it just blew my mind the way this particular science appeared.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago> Who would have guessed this would work? A lot of people? The carbon has to end up somewhere. I don't see this as surprising at all, any more than it's surprising that if you, a human, eat a lot of arsenic, you'll add some of it to your hair. Growing hair and growing silk are not fundamentally different activities.
- madaxe_again 12y agoThis is fascinating stuff - now they just need to feed genetically modified spider-goats graphene and see what happens! http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16554357 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16554357 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioSteel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioSteel
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- fennecfoxen 12y agonobody cares, the carbon-fiber diet is not genetic
- DrStalker 12y agoIs there a word like serendipity that means "found as a joke" instead of "found by a fortunate accident?"
- karmakaze 12y agoJust when I'm full up on superhero themes it gets all interesting again.
- posnet 12y agoPeter parker was just your average day Pholcidae spider, until one fateful day when he was exposed to experimental carbon nano-tubes. Now he must decide, will he use his new found super web powers for good, or for personal gain?
- qbrass 12y agoTime to make another movie reboot.
- pests 12y agoA third (reboot) is already planned, you mean you want a forth?!
- DrStalker 12y agoOne where he starts as an actual spider and gets bitten by a radioactive man, just to give us something different forth time around.
- lotsofmangos 12y agoHe could team up with Man-Bat - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-Bat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-Bat
- abell 12y agoJust like "The Spider", a villain in Rat-Man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat-Man_%28comics%29#The_Spider http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat-Man_%28comics%29#The_Spider It can't climb walls, but has acquired human personality traits: selfishness, greed and cruelty.
- 12y ago
- the8472 12y ago> “This new reinforcing procedure could also be applied to other animals and plants, leading to a new class of bionic materials,” how about silk worms? at least we know how to handle those in bulk.
- Bluestrike2 12y agoThere's a lot of effort going into just that, though there are some stumbling blocks researchers are still working their way through before we start seeing production scaled up. http://news.discovery.com/tech/spider-silk-silkworms-genetic-engineering.htm http://news.discovery.com/tech/spider-silk-silkworms-genetic...
- e12e 12y agoBut how about just natural silk with carbon nanotubes? Sure spidersilk is "the greatest" -- but maybe nano-augmented regular silk is better than, well regular silk? [ed: insert dystopian sci-fi plot of scattered survivors of the nano apocalypse growing bullet proof vests from silk worms found in old industrial (nano)waste sites...]
- dedward 12y agoWhat do you mean by "natural silk". Where do you think "natural silk" comes from?
- e12e 12y agoI meant silkworm-silk. I wonder if silkworms can be made to make regular silk that's augmented with nanotubes for a similar (relative) increase in strength, with similar easy process (shower silk-worms and their food with water with nanotubes etc).
- wmeredith 12y ago"Natural silk" aka "silk" comes from silkworms.
- gnoway 12y agoThis is sad, in a way; once I achieve my dream of exterminating all the spiders there won't be any left to spin this nanotube-reinforced fiber.
- ionwake 12y agoUnless the spiders start wearing spider nanotube silk weaved spider kevlar
- superplussed 12y agoThe most interesting part of the article for me was: "Nobody has discovered an efficient way to harvest spider silk, although not for lack of trying. " I would love to know more about these attempts. Searching google brings up doesn't help much as the keywords "mine" and "web" can have a wholly different connotation.
- 2muchcoffeeman 12y agoStory of how they weaved the only spider silk rug in the world. Spider Wranglers Weave One-Of-A-Kind Tapestry http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113223398 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1132233...
- bitwize 12y agoThe efficient way is to genetically-engineer goats to produce the silk from their teats.
- thomax 12y agoSo what happens when these spiders start reinforcing their exoskeletons with the ingested nanomaterial? Angry, eight-legged predators in ultratough kevlar, shooting indestructible web, that's what :)
- BurningFrog 12y agoJust add some mood enhancers to the fiber soup to counteract the angriness.
- mrfusion 12y agoAre these strong enough to build a space elevator?
- timboslice 12y agoFrom other comments: cnvogel: it's assumed that materials with about 130 GPa of tensile strength would be needed for the "rope" of an space elevator e12e: nanomagic spider silk: 5400 MPa (5.4 GPa)
- chrisfarms 12y ago> exactly how the spiders incorporate carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes into their silk is not clear This confuses me. Surely they must've had some kind of hypothesis for this, or are they just going around spraying all kinds of creatures hoping they gain super-powers?
- dedward 12y agoWell, spiders eat stuff, and poop out magic thread. So change their diet, you change the thread...
- chrisfarms 12y agoLuckily for all those times I've walked face first into a spider's web: Spider silk != Poop
- zobzu 12y agoTldr its stronger than kevlar they say Cool!
- bdamm 12y agoStrong enough for space elevator core?
- aunty_helen 12y agoWhat would a bunch of spiders do with a space elevator?
- iamcurious 12y agoApparently not. From other comments: cnvogel: it's assumed that materials with about 130 GPa of tensile strength would be needed for the "rope" of an space elevator e12e: nanomagic spider silk: 5400 MPa (5.4 GPa)
- ChuckMcM 12y agoOk that is pretty cool, combine it with this work (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-05/tum-ihs051010.php http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-05/tum-ihs051010...) where folks are figuring out how to spin spider silk without the spiders, and you've got an interesting start.
- shanev 12y agoGoes to show that us humans aren't the best at making everything. Wish I thought of this when studying nanotechnology in grad school.
- fit2rule 12y agoWe're not the best at making anything. We're pretty good at using things, though.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- smuser90 12y ago“This new reinforcing procedure could also be applied to other animals and plants, leading to a new class of bionic materials,” they say. Could it be applied to human stem cells or bone marrow? That'd be neat.
- spevak 12y agoIncredible. I bet the results could be improved even further with artificial selection to get spiders that are even better at incorporating carbon into their silk
- e12e 12y agoSo, for those that don't remember what "regular" spider silk is like, or kevlar: nanomagic spider silk: 5400 MPa (5.4 GPa) Spider silk: 1600 MPa Silkworm silk: 500 MPa Aramid (Kevlar or Twaron): 3620 MPa Steel: 450 ~ 2600 MPa If I'm reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_tensile_strength http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_tensile_strength correctly (and comparing the right numbers with the ones from the article...). At least kevlar seem to be in the same ballpark.
- cnvogel 12y agoInterestingly the spider silk of 5.4 GPa has higher tensile strength than the specimens of "pure" carbon nanotubes of 2cm measured in labs at 3.6 GPa. The theoretical limit of cabon nanotubes is said to be at 300 GPa, and it's assumed that materials with about 130 GPa of tensile strength would be needed for the "rope" of an space elevator.
- EGreg 12y agoCan a human actually break such a tiny web?
- cnvogel 12y agoAccording to wikipedia, the diameter of natural spider silk is 4µm, which is a cross section area of 1.26e-11 m². Multiplied by the tensile strength of natural spider silk (5.4 GPa) gives the capacity to lift 68 milinewtoms, or 7 Grams! http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%284e-6+meter+%2F+2%29%5E2+*+pi+*+5.4e9+pascal+%2F+%289.81+m%2Fs%5E2%29 http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%284e-6+meter+%2F+2%29%...
- lmm 12y agoIt's only ~4x stronger than regular spider silk, so I'm going to say yes.
- BurningFrog 12y agoThanks. Those numbers were sorely missing from the article.
- lotsofmangos 12y agomatching the toughness of state-of-the-art carbon fibers such as Kevlar I don't think I would call kevlar a carbon fiber, is more like nylon.
- vermooten 12y agoWake up sheeple! Isn't this exactly how the Arachnids of Klendathu came into being?
- bitwize 12y agoI smell an origin story for Peter Parker's web shooters in the upcoming second Spider-Man reboot.
- JeffreyKaine 12y agoFINALLY, A SPIDERMAN QUOTE. Seriously, I've been reading every comment. It took me almost 20 minutes to find a spiderman reference. Frankly, that's surprising...
- an4rchy 12y agoSo it basically looks like whatever the spider consumes (as food?), it will incorporate into its silk if not needed. In the interest of science, might be interesting to try different food coloring, spices/aromas based sprays to see if that would make the spider silk more colorful or create fragrant webs -- Also, this could be a special evolutionary trait to attract food (right aroma/color?)
- neurocis 12y agoSpiderman would be envious.
- ahains 12y agoThis is SO cool. I'm going to start adding nanotubes to my morning coffee so I can write the unbreakable codez!
- pvaldes 12y agoAnd Pholcidae are not even the creators of the stronger webs in the world. With about 200.000 different types of spider silk in the planet, is really exciting to dream about what major league players like Nephila or Caerostris could achieve with this stuff.
- stillsut 12y agoIt's not a bug it's a feature.