"A material that mimics superpowers is always a very, very good thing."

With Great Power

Tufts University biotech researcher Marco Lo Presti made an astonishing discovery while investigating how silk and dopamine allow mussels to stick to rocky surfaces.

"While using acetone to clean the glassware of this silk and dopamine substance," he told Wired, "I noticed it was undergoing a transition into a solid format, into a web-looking material, into something that looked like a fiber."

Lo Presti and his colleagues immediately got to work, investigating whether the sticky fibers could be turned into a "remote adhesive."

The result is an astonishingly "Spider Man"-like silk that can be shot not unlike the superhero's wrist-mounted web shooters, as detailed in a paper published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials last year.

While it won't allow an adult person to swing from skyscraper to skyscraper any time soon, the results speak for themselves. Footage of the team's experiments shows strands of the material being dripped onto a number of objects from several inches above, forming a solid connection in a matter of seconds and allowing the object to be carried away.

The researcher's collaborator, Tufts engineering professor Fiorenzo Omenetto, recalled being caught off guard by the accidental discovery.

"You explore and you play and you sort of connect the dots," he told Wired. "Part of the play that is very underestimated is where you say 'Hey, wait a second, is this like a Spider-Man thing?' And you brush it off at first, but a material that mimics superpowers is always a very, very good thing."

Comes Great Responsibility

Intriguingly, Lo Presti explained that no spider has the ability to "shoot a stream of solution, which turns into a fiber and does the remote capturing of a distant object."

In other words, the discovery appears to be entirely new, despite initially being inspired by nature.

The fibers also have an impressive tensile strength.

"We can now catch an object up to 30 or 35 centimeters away, and lift an object of around 15 to 20 grams," Lo Presti told Wired.

But scaling it up could prove difficult.

"Everybody wants to know if we're going to be able to swing from buildings," Omenetto added, stopping short of hazarding a guess as to when or if that's possible.

"I mean you could probably lift a very heavy object, but that’s one of the big questions — what can you lift? Can you remotely drag something?" he added. "Silk is very, very strong, it’s very tough, it can lift incredible weights but this is silk in its natural form whether it’s from the spider or the silkworm."

More on the silk shooters: Researchers Create Real-Life "Spider-Man" Web-Slinging Tech


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