Science has come true Spider-Man’s web

Slow but sure We are taking advantage of the devices we imagine, when we were children, that would bring us the future. See Penny Brown video from Inspector Gadget? Check. The tricodifier of the stellar fleet of Trip to the stars? We almost arrived. But shoot cunning? Power launch? That was not one of us In fact I thought I would do the crossover. And neither was it exactly in the scientist’s plans that has made the strong and sticky air woven network come true, Marco Lo Presti, of the Silklab of the University of Tufts.

In 2020, LO PRESTI, Assistant Research Professor in Biomedical Engineering, was working on the challenge of submarine adhesives. The first material with which he chose to work was composed of silk and dopamine, a popular combination because he mimics the way in which mussels firmly adhere to rocky surfaces in the water, something that has been useful in other applications.

“While using acetone to clean the glassware of this silk and dopamine substance,” he says, “I observed that I was experiencing a transition to a solid format, to a material with a network appearance, to something that looked like a fiber. I showed the roads to Fio and immediately began to think about how we could make a remote adhesive (a substance that adheres to a distance object) from them. ”

Fio is Fiorenzo Omenetto, professor of engineering at TUFTS and “puppeteer” of Silklab. “We would like to say that each experiment is carefully planned with equations and a lot of forecast, but in reality it is a connection,” he says. “You explore, play and connect the points. Part of the work that is very underestimated is when you say ‘hey, expect a second, is this like a spider-man thing?’ And at first you ignore it, but a material that mimics super powers is always something very, very good. ”

However, before he could focus his attention on these accidental networks, he had to complete his paper On submarine adhesives using biomolecules, which made a large part of Silklab’s work in 2021. It could become something useful may seem an easy step for the team.

However, the Presti points out that although the new material imitates spider threads, “there is no spider capable of expelling, firing a solution of solution, which becomes a fiber and remote capture a distant object.” This was something new, at least for the real world.

But as research work points out in Advanced functional materials Notes: Enter fictional characters. In the original comics of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko of the 60s, starting with Amazing fantasy #15Peter Parker builds a “small device”, one subject to each wrist and activated by the pressure of the fingers, to produce strands of ‘spider fabrics’ ejectable. In the mid -2000s, Sam Raimi Spider -Man In the films, the filming of the network went from being a row device that took an organic part of its superhero transformation on the wrist.