It
appears that there are mutant Spiders out there in the wild, thanks to the
crazy scientists at the University of Trento in Trento!
For
some strange reason, a team of scientists at the University of Trento in
Trento, Italy led by
Dr.
Emiliano Lepore sprayed fifteen (15) Pholcidae Spiders with water infused with
carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes as reported in the article “Mutant
super-Spiders weave webs stronger than bulletproof material”, published May
9, 2015 by Danny Gallagher, CNET News.
Result
was not that one of the scientists got bitten and transformed into Spiderman.
Rather, more impressively, fifteen (15) Pholcidae Spiders began producing Spider
Silk that contained the Carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes, making them super
strong as reported in the article “Spiders
Ingest Nanotubes, Then Weave Silk Reinforced with Carbon”, published May 6,
2015, MIT Technology Review.
Scientists spray Spiders
with Carbon nanotube water – Spiders web not made from the food they eat
What
hypothesis did the scientists use to make the decision to spray the Spiders
with water infused with carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes?
Possibly
they assumed that the Pholcidae Spider’s Silk was not made from the food it
ate, but from other material it gathered from its environment, seeing as the Spiders
spinnerets that produces the Spider Silk is different from is excretory system.
Also
they mainly eat the blood of the creatures that fall into their web, suggesting
that whatever material made up their Spider Silk, possibly did not come from
the blood and other bodily fluids absorbed from their victims.
The
scientists at the University of Trento then compared the strength of these Spider
Silk strands to the reference by placing the Spider Silk into a device that
could measure the Young’s modulus as well as the toughness modulus of these
materials.
The
device fixed the Spider Silk between two (2) C-shaped cardboard holders in a
machine that could measure the load on the fiber as small as 15 nano-newtons
and axial and bending displacement with a resolution of 0.1 nanometers.
Based
on the readings from the machines, the results point to a fiber stronger than
any known organic material known to man, to quote Dr. Emiliano Lepore: “We
measure a fracture strength up to 5.4 GPa, a Young’s modulus up to 47.8 GPa and
a toughness modulus up to 2.1 GPa. This is the highest toughness modulus for a
fibre, surpassing synthetic polymeric high performance fibres (e.g. Kelvar49)
and even the current toughest knotted fibers”.
In
fact, the Spider Silk in their webs is so strong, it's strong than the
strongest know manmade organic fiber, Kevlar, which is used in the making of
Bullet proof vests. The scientists made sure to have the Spiders initially spin
webs made of regular Spider Silk to be used as reference.
University of Trento feeds Pholcidae Spiders with Carbon nanotubes
and graphene – Spiderman strong Silk is the result
So
how did the Spiders incorporate the carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes into
their Spider Silk?
No
one is sure, as this previous methods have simply involved coating the Spider Silk
with a vapour of any material that researchers wanted to add to the Spider Silk.
This is technically the first time that anyone has attempted to feed the Spiders
a material and they incorporated into their Spider Silk, suggesting a mechanism
by which Spider Silk can be improved.
It's
already possible to make Spider Silk from Transgenic Silkworms based on the
work of USTAR Professor Randy Lewis in collaboration with Dr. Malcolm Fraser
from the University of Notre Dame.
Synthetic
Spider Silk was also produced from
Transgenic Escherichia Coli Bacteria based on the work of Dr. My Hedhammar of
the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Director of R&D at
Spiber Technologies in Uppsala as reported in my blog article
entitled “USTAR
produces Spider Silk From Transgenic Silkworms and Japanese Spiber from
Transgenic Escherichia Coli Bacteria - Spider Silk's big trend in Fabrics which
means I’m Out Ciara and Nikki Minaj Style”.
But
harvesting Spider Silk directly from Spiders isn't currently possible, despite
previous attempts., making this discovery not only significant, even groundbreaking,
but so elegantly simple as to make me wonder why scientists are just discovering
this.
Perhaps
previous scientists thought that the Spider’s selective taste for blood mean
that they would have not ingested the water choc full of non-nutritious carbon
nanotubes and graphene flakes. Also even if they’d ingested, perhaps previous scientists
thought they’d simply excrete it as a waste product, unused in their production
of Silk.
Perhaps
much in the same way carbon nanotubes and graphene flake can be incorporated
into Spider Silk by feeding it to Spiders in their food, could it also be
possible to make stronger synthetic Spider Silk by also including in other nutrient
solution of the above mentioned transgenic organisms?
That's
the next experiment I'd like to see done!
No comments:
Post a Comment