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Scientists Crack Silk's Secret
AEton writes "Researchers at Tufts University have reportedly discovered the mechanism by which spidersilk is produced. Besides the obvious use as a Kevlar substitute in bulletproof vests, silk has applications in microprocessor production, nanoscale optical fiber, a and any other application requiring strength and flexbility. Scientists have long grappled with the issue of creating silk; artificial silk is inferior to the real stuff, and the spiders can't be farmed (when you put them too close together, they eat each other). The method these Tufts researchers have found makes "strong silk" production feasible; if they can make it economical, the impact on safety equipment alone makes this material a worthwhile investment."
... but isn't it that the larvae of a kind of moth that produces silk for fabric industry use? The larvae spinds the silk to form a cocoon, and people uses the cocoon to make silk thread.
Searching ScAm's Ask the Expert section, I found the following:
"Dragline silk [a kind of silk all spiders make] is a composite material comprised of two different proteins, each containing three types of regions with distinct properties. One of these forms an amorphous (noncrystalline) matrix that is stretchable, giving the silk elasticity. When an insect strikes the web, the stretching of the matrix enables the web to absorb the kinetic energy of the insects flight. Embedded in the amorphous portions of both proteins are two kinds of crystalline regions that toughen the silk. Although both kinds of crystalline regions are tightly pleated and resist stretching, one of them is rigid. It is thought that the pleats of the less rigid crystalline regions not only fit into the pleats in the rigid crystals but that they also interact with the amorphous areas in the proteins, thus anchoring the rigid crystals to the matrix. The resulting composite is strong, tough, and yet elastic."
SiLK which is used for microprocessor applications is not connected in any way to spider silk. The former is an acronymn for a resin
(aromatic hydrocarbon) made by Dow Chemicals and used by IBM and other chip companies as an insulator between the multiple layers of wires on a chip. Silicon Low-K = SiLK
I don't, but google does.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
http://us.expasy.org/spotlight/articles/sptlt02
"Spider silk is 40 times finer than human hair and right up to World War II, it was used for crosshairs in optical devices such as microscopes, guns and bomb-guiding systems. In fact, though crosshairs are now etched or made with metal filaments, some military facilities still keep a domesticated black widow spider as a silk provision for old instruments. To this day, Australian aborigines use the silk of a giant spider for fishing lines."
Knowing how to collect Black Widow silk is essential if you are repairing and restoring old microscopes and other optical equipment. They are not aggressive, and live a long time, and are content in a very small container.
"The energy required to break spider silk (its 'toughness') is about ten times that of other natural materials such as cellulose, collagen and chitin. Dragline silk (about .00032 inch (.008 mm) in Nephila) is especially strong - approximately twice that of silk from silkworms." Google to the rescue again.
well, the bad thing about black widows is that many people become alergic to the anti-venom, so you get bit once, go to the Dr. get a shot (you have time, but you need the shot, it's a hemotoxin) get bit a second time, you can suffer from the vemon, AND then they inject you with antivenon, and the alergic reaction makes you die faster.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
There is a company, I believe its called gemisis, that is creating diamonds using a laser induced plasma cloud. The diamonds were taken to am inspection lab, and the only way the techs could discern them from natural diamonds was that the artificial ones were too perfect. Diamonds generated by heat and pressure in a lab have more flaws then natural, but the plasma diamonds had too little flaws. I suppose you could dope the chamber with a few minerals and come out with a diamond that was very damn hard to detect. You can read all about it in the latest Wired magazine.
-William
God is everything science has yet to explain.
Nope, sorry. If we used steel for a space elevator the cable would have to be as wide as the milky way. If we used something like kevlar or silk the cable would have to be as wide as the earth (better than steel but still not fesible). If we used carbon nanotubes the cable will only have to be 6 inches wide at the top.
I'm pretty sure elasticity does not come from the sticky quality. Spiders coat silk with sticky stuff only for certain parts of their web. The rest is not coated with it.
-cp-
You're wrong about that I'm afraid. It has been known for quite some time how to produce gold from other elements. (calling it artificial gold dosen't make any sense because it's real gold, indistinguishable, of course, from any other atom of gold). It is done by bombarding Mercury with Deuterons: Hg200 + H2 ---> Au198 + He4. Unfortunately Gold 198 is radioactive and decays back to Mercury in a few days. Glen Seaborg did a simillar experiment in the late '70's. The catch is that you would expend much more money to make the energy(probably thousands of times more) to accelerate the Deuterons in order to create the gold than you could ever recover by selling what you produced.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
The story was Misfit. This is the story that introduces Andy Libby, who would appear in the later Heinlein novels Methusalah's Children, The Number of the Beast and To Sail Beyond the Sunset.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Nope, you had it right the first time. Some strands of a spider's web are sticky, some are not. It's not for "extra support for the web" as it is "it's nice to be able to walk around without sticking to my own house." The spiders know which strands are which. And if they have to step on a sticky strand, they just pull themselves loose.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
They're not fake, they're just artificially created, and are as much a diamond as 'real' diamonds are.