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."

Comments

Spider farming

[cybermace5]

Do you honestly think anyone EVER seriously considered farming spiders for their silk? The idea of unimaginable numbers of spiders all together is chilling even to the bravest of us. And of course they'd discover that black widows or brown recluses or giant bird spiders produced the strongest silk, and then they would escape....
*shudder*

Re:Spider farming

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

Welcome to your nightmare, come true. Spiders WERE farmed by Zeiss, Bausch & Lomb and others, and black widows had the best silk
http://us.expasy.org/spotlight/articles/sptlt024 .html
"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.

Finally!

[slackingme]

Yes, finally! We can start producing super-strong silk boxers to protect all us sexy geeks from the swarms of girls outside our rooms. Personally, I'm all for reducing user latency in the kernel and reading the latest rant by RMS, but *indestructable silk boxers* get me really excited. I'm blowing through several pairs a week when I leave the dark, secluded safety of my room to get more gin and tonic at the store. I certainly can't make the swarm go away, but this takes care of a symptom!

Re:Eh?

[pajamacore]

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."

Re:A changing world...

[NotAnotherReboot]

Perhaps the part about changing materials that are next to worthless into something valuable is what you mean by alchemy, but none of this is anything like alchemy. Atoms are not being transformed into the "diamond atom" from the carbon atom, it is still carbon, just in a different form.

Obviously, the diamond industry has reason to worry if the fakes are indistinguishable, but I'm not sure what you're talking about a "cult-like anti-scientific religion," that is just silly.

There is nothing wrong with economical silk- after all, how big is the industry, and are the people in it that well off right now? Silk is something with actual applications (diamonds do as well, but not as many). Science marches on and puts people out of work, but at the end of the day, they find another line of work and everyone is better off. The standard of living in the developed world has steadily increased- and most of it is because of science.

Spare me of the doomsday theories.

Sacrifice a spider-silk goat

[Anonymous Coward]

How long until workers in industries "ruined" by scientific development ... develop a cult-like anti-scientific religion and take over the world?

I imagine a bizarre cult of disgruntled former Kevlar workers sacrificing one of the spider-silk goats.

What ever happened with the spider-silk goat and cow experiments anyway? Or is that how they got enough material for the current breakthrough?

Hey! HEY! Stop that! No goatse links!

Another Application

[tunabomber]

You don't suppose this stuff could be strong enough to make a space elevator, could it?

spider silk is _not_ the same as SiLK

[sarpedon77]

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

Re:Eh?

[danila]

I am really disturbed by the tendency of people to proclaim "scientists are no match for millions of years of evolution" after scientists understand (somewhat) another mystery. Look, this achievement is the first step after a long preparatory work. Now for the first time scientists really understand what is going on. Yes, they still don't know some aspects of the process, but they are just getting started. The area of bionics is booming. Just recently we could read in the news that engineers are building submarines that swim without propellers - by moving the "tail" instead. Yes, their crude attempts are no match for a dolphin, but give them time. We have supersonic aicrafts, we have spaceships, we can dig more than 10km deep into the Earth, we can move from the ocean surface into the Mariana trench in the same craft, we can build moving objects weighting million tons! Can the nature do that? Did the evolution do that? The answer is a resounding no!

So wait a few years (at most a decade) and artificial spider silk will be stronger than natural. After a decade more we will have not only stronger, but ligher, more flexible, cheaper and overall better threads than any spider will ever have. Evolution is too slow and we gave it a huge start - billions of years. And we are gaining on it now.

Re:Bulletproof vest?

[panurge]

You don't. It's the ceramic plates that stop the bullets. The Kevlar is there to hold the thing together.

And, given the time that life has had to develop, it is far from amazing that "natural" materials can be strong. Life is a bit like an arms race that has been going on for over a billion years. The development of advanced materials by human beings using brainpower and technology is just an extension of the normal mechanisms of evolution.

Wood (for instance) is chemically and structurally similar to many advanced composite plastics, and the strongest woods are as strong as structural plastics. It just shows that there is a clever way of making strong, resilient materials and that you can do this by natural selection of biochemistry or you can do it by technology. It's interesting, but not amazing.