Slowly but surely, We carry out the gadgets that we have imagined, as a child, that the future would hold. Penny Brown’s video watch Inspector gadget? Check. The Tricoder Starfleet of Star Trek? Almost there. But the web fire? Sinsive web? It was not a world Really Thought would make the crossover. And it was not exactly in the plans for the scientist who made strong, sticky and air, Marco Lo Presti, of Silklab from Tofts University.
In 2020, Lo Presti, assistant teacher of research in biomedical engineering, worked on the challenge of submarine adhesives. The first material on which he chose to work was made up of silk and dopamine, a popular combination because it imitates the way the mussels firmly stick to rock surfaces in water – something that was useful in Other applications.
“While using acetone to clean the glassware of this silk and dopamine substance,” he says, “I noticed that he was undergoing a solid format, in a web appearance material, In something that looked like a fiber. I showed the bottles in Fio, and we immediately started to think about how we could make a distant adhesive [a substance that sticks to an object from a distance] outside.
Fio is Fiorenzo Omenetto, engineering professor in Tufts and “puppeteer” of Silklab. “We would like to say that each experience is meticulously planned with equations and a lot of foresight, but it is really a connection,” he said. “You explore and play and somehow connect the points. Part of the room that is very underestimated is the place where you say “hey, wait a second, is it like a Spider-Man thing?” And you brush it at first, but a material that imitates superpowers is always a very, very good thing. “”
Before Lo Presti could focus on these accidental canvases, however, he had to finish his paper On underwater adhesives using biomolecules, which he did in 2021. Silklab’s work is “bio -inspired” by spiders and silkworms, mussels and mate, velvet velvet mud, even tropical orchids – to know if this tighting web could become something useful may seem to be a Easy side step for the team.
However, Lo Presti underlines that if the new material imitates the spider threads, “there is no spider capable of eject, to draw a flow of solution, which turns into a fiber and makes the capture at a distance of a remote object. ” It was something new, for the real world at least.
But as the research document in Advanced functional materials Notes – Inputing fictitious characters. In the original comics of the 1960s of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, starting with Amazing Fantasy # 15Peter Parker builds a “small device”, attached to each wrist and triggered by the pressure of the fingers, to produce strands of ejectible “spider canvas”. At the time of the mid -2000s, Sam Raimi Spider Films, the web shooting has gone from a spinneret gadget worn on the wrist to an organic part of its superhero transformation.
