slowly but surely, We benefit from devices that, as children, we imagined the future would hold. Watch Benny Brown’s video from Inspector tool? Checks. Starfleet Tricoder Star Trek? Almost there. But web photography? Web sling? This wasn’t one of us truly The thought would make the intersection. This wasn’t exactly in the plans of the scientist who made the strong, sticky, air-woven web a reality either, Marco Lo Presti of Tufts University’s Silk Lab.
In 2020, Lou Presti, an 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 mussels stick firmly to rocky surfaces in the water, something that was useful in Other applications.
“While using acetone to clean glassware of this silk-and-dopamine material, I noticed that it was going through a transition into a solid form, into a mesh-like material, into something that looked like fibers,” he says. I showed the vials to Fio, and we immediately started thinking about how to make a remote adhesive [a substance that sticks to an object from a distance] To get out of it.”
Fio is Fiorenzo Omenetto, an engineering professor at Tufts University and Silklab’s “puppeteer.” “We like to say that every experiment is very carefully planned with equations and a lot of thought, but it’s really about correlation,” he says. “You’re exploring and you’re playing and you’re connecting the dots. A very underrated part of the play is when you say, ‘Hey, wait a minute, is this like a Spider-Man movie?’” And you might shrug it off at first, but superpowered material is always something Very very good.
Before Lo Presti could turn his attention to these spin-off networks, he had to complete his interest paper On underwater adhesives using biomolecules, which he did in 2021. Lots of Silklab work It’s “biologically inspired” by spiders, silkworms, mussels, barnacles, velvetworm slimes, and even tropical orchids — so seeing if this sticky web could become something useful might seem like an easy side step for the team.
However, Le Presti points out that although the new material mimics spider threads, “no spider is able to eject and release a stream of solution, which turns into fibers and picks up a distant object at a distance.” This was something new, to the real world at least.
But as a research paper in Advanced functional materials Notes – Insert fictional characters. In the original comic books by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in the 1960s, starting with Amazing Fantasy #15Peter Parker has built a “micro-device”, a device that attaches to each wrist and is operated by finger pressure, to produce strands of extrudeable “spider webs”. By the mid-2000s, it was Sam Raimi Spider-Man In the movies, webcasting has gone from a wrist-worn spinner to an organic part of a superhero’s transformation.
