Spider-Man is one of, if not the most popular superhero on the planet, and anyone who is a fan of Peter Parker has once imagined what it would be like to be able to shoot a web out of their wrist and swing through the concrete jungle of New York City taking down bad guys.
While we are still many years away from that becoming a reality, the foundations of Spider-Man’s web fluid have been officially created. According to a team of researchers out of Tufts University Silklab that penned a study published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials, the first web-slinging technology has been created in the form of a fluid material that immediately solidifies after being shot out of a needle. Researchers took silky fibers from moth cocoons, which can then be reduced to its building block fibers called fibroin.
The fibroin is then combined with specific adhesives and shot of a needle tip device to create a stream. Shortly after the web fluid is fibered, it sticks to objects and then solidifies, making it possible to tether to objects. The researchers attribute their inspiration for this device to the incredible strength of spiderwebs, which are 1,000 times stronger than the artificial web created by the researchers in this study, and comic books. While the researchers’ web isn’t anywhere near as strong as a spiderweb it can still pick up objects over 80 times its own weight under various conditions.
“If you look at nature, you will find that spiders cannot shoot their web. They usually spin the silk out of their gland, physically contact a surface, and draw out the lines to construct their webs. We are demonstrating a way to shoot a fiber from a device, then adhere to and pick up an object from a distance. Rather than presenting this work as a bio-inspired material, it’s really a superhero-inspired material,” said Marco Lo Presti, research assistant professor at Tufts
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The discovery was made completely by accident. “I was working on a project making extremely strong adhesives using silk fibroin, and while I was cleaning my glassware with acetone, I noticed a web-like material forming on the bottom of the glass,” said Lo Presti