Scientists from Tufts University’s Silklab have developed real Spider-Man webbing strong enough to lift up steel bolts. The sticky fibrous material comes from silk moth cocoons, which are broken down into their fibroin protein building blocks by boiling them in a solution.
This solution is then capable of being shot out through narrow bore needles to form a stream that solidifies when it’s exposed to air, thanks to a mixture of additives. Silk from the silk moth (Bombyx mori) was selected because it has similar properties to spiders’ silk but has less structural complexity, and the raw material itself is much easier to come by.
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As scientists and engineers, we navigate the boundary between imagination and practice. We can be inspired by nature. We can be inspired by comics and science fiction. In this case, we wanted to reverse engineer our silk material to behave the way nature originally designed it, and comic book writers imagined it,” said Fiorenzo Omenetto, professor of engineering at Tufts.
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