Slowly but surely, We are fine with the devices we imagined, as children, that the future would hold. Penny Brown’s Video Clock Inspector Gadget? Check. The Starfleet -Tritikoder of Star Trek? Almost there. But web shooting? Website Slango? That wasn’t one we really Thought will make the crossover. And it wasn’t exactly the plans for the scientist who made the strong, sticky, air-spun website, Marco Lo Presti, from the Silkinab of Tufts University.
In 2020, Lo Presti, a research assistant in biomedical engineering, worked on the challenge of underwater tails. The first material he chose to work was made up of silk and dopamine, a popular combination because it mimics the way mussels firmly stick to rock surfaces in water – something useful in Other applications.
“While using acetone to clean the glass of this silk and dopamine substance,” he says, “I noticed that it suffers from a transition into a solid format, into web-looking material, into something that looked like a fiber. I showed the flaps to FIO, and we immediately began to think about how we could make a distant tail [a substance that sticks to an object from a distance] from it. ”
Fio is Fiorenzo Ometto, Professor of Engineering at Tufts and “Puppeteer” of the Silklab. “We would like to say that every experiment is very planned with equations and a lot of anticipation, but it’s really about a relationship,” he says. “You explore and you play and you connect the points. Part of the play very underestimated is where you say ‘He, wait a second, is this like Spider-Man?’ And you push it off at first, but a material that mimics superpowers is always a very, very good thing. ”
Before Lo Presti could turn his attention to these accidental sites, yet he had to complete his Paper on underwater tails using biomolecules he made in 2021. Many of the Silklab’s work It is “inspired” by spiders and silk worms, mussels and barnacles, velvet worm-slime, even tropical orchids-do processing if this sticky site could become something useful could seem easy side step for the team.
However, Lo Presti points out that while the new material mimics spider threads, “there is no spider capable of ejecting, shooting a flow of a solution that becomes fiber and makes the distant capture of a distant object.” This was something new, at least for the real world.
But as the research paper in Advanced Functional Materials Notes – Enter fictional characters. In the original comics of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko Wonderful fantasy #15Peter Parker builds a “small device”, one fixed to each wrist and triggered with finger pressure, to produce cords of ejecting “web sites.” By the time of the mid-2000s Sam Raimi Spider-Man Movies, the web shooting changed from wrist-wear spinneret-gadget to organic part of his superhero transformation.