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Artificial Skin Made From Spider Silk
Tissue engineer Hanna Wendt has released a study about using spider silk to create artificial skin. The study found that "spider silks display excellent mechanical features that even rival man-made, high-tech fibers," but didn't mention anything about patients gaining the ability to climb walls or sense impending danger. From the article: "Despite being impressed by how human cells responded to spider silk, Wendt thinks the use of synthetic fibers must be considered, especially since harvesting large amounts of spider silk is not practical."
What do you mean harvesting large amounts of spider silk is impractical? We have farm designs already. http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/DF2010:Giant_cave_spider#Farming_Silk
on how many spiders you got, mate.
Now, I'm willing to make a deal on this lot. Something to get you "over the hump", shall we say.
When I tell you, I think you'll like my price.
There's more where I got them from. So be a good boy: go and tell your little friends about it, right?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Now if you just made the silk radioactive.....
Up in the corners of my living room ceiling, there's a supply good for 1-2 years at least...
It is great and all that they found this to be a viable material for creating skin grafts, but it seems to suffer from the same problems as every other spider silk application or for that mater every novel new material. Basically we can't produce it in useable commercial quantities.
Time to offend someone
It's actually grown on spider silk, much like culture grown on a petri dish. They need a suitable substrate to grow it on, but they cultured the skin itself from actual human skin cells.
"Have you ever had that feeling like spiders were crawling all over your skin? Well, modern science has just developed this new artificial skin..."
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
Cool... Does having spider-silk skin give you the ability to walk up walls- have "spidey senses" and dates with um... whatshername- that red headed girl that played Mary Jane.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Perhaps we need to breed some much larger spiders? Nothing could possibly go wrong....
Cobwebs were a common treatment for wounds
http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/media/docs/spiderweb
Nephila has been used to make cloth:
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/spidersilk/
Here is the original article:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0021833
As far as I can see this company is the closest to large scale spider silk production is @ http://www.kraiglabs.com/
Supposedly they have modified standard silk worms to express spider silk proteins. While not pure spidersilk, the fact that it's piggybacked on top of the silk worm genome means that once they are successful they will be able to rely on the centuries’ worth of know-how, experience and infrastructure associated with silk production to generate commercially viable quantities of 'spider' silk.
They are traded on the PINKs exchange, and there is alot of BS companies flying around there, that do nothing more than steal your money. But at the same time these guys originally did the research at the U of N.D., so that does land them some extra credulence.
DISCLAIMER: I hold a small position in their stock (KBLB), but I’m not trying to pump or anything like that. Just thought it was some very neat science and bought in, probably not best factor to base financial decisions on.
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... since harvesting large amounts of spider silk is not practical.
No problem, just cross-breed spiders with goats to make a goat that can be milked for silk.
Or you could just buy one pre-bred. ISTR Nexia selling theirs.
I distinctly recall reading several articles (probably about 10 years ago?) saying how scientists were able to generate large quantities of spider silk ["synthetic" spider silk? call it whatever you want...] by genetically altering cows and just milking them. The silk could then be extracted from the cow milk.
After 10 years, no one has tried to improve on this extraction process? Kinda baffling that they would even start down that path if they weren't really going to follow up on it...
Karma: NaN
Arrrggg! My Morgellon's is flaring up.
More music, fewer hits
NT dammit
Play Command HQ online
Until some NASA engineer steals your skin to build a space elevator.
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
"spider silks display excellent mechanical features"
So does that mean I can replace my skin with this new skin and be impervious to being cut?
PLz tell meh wher ei can phArM spider silks, so i can get some phat lewt at the action house!!!!!
Goats are too dangerous, just imagine one falling from the ceiling and actually hitting someone!
There is this old folk-remedy of putting a sider web on an open wound to make it heal faster.
Heard this one from Grandma, if I could only find a written source..
C'mon, has everyone forgotten about Spider Goats? The progress has appeared slow (those articles are a decade apart), but that's possibly due to the more-military-than-civilian applications thus far.
You might want to check out this science/art project from a few months back: http://jalilaessaidi.com/2-6g-329ms/
They made actual bulletproof skin using human skin and spidersilk.
Just go out an milk em! And hurry! The chicken coop has to be swept before the school bus arrives!
I was riding a bike in South Korea once when I saw a dumpster full of manure on a farm. It was underneath a roof, and between the rafters and the sides of the dumpster, there was a thick veil of spider webs. There were hundreds of spiders living on this web, taking the flies that went for the cow shit, I presume. I don't know the name of the species, but they look similar to what are called "banana spiders" in the midwest US. They are black and yellow, and the females have leg spans of something like 3-4 inches. Also, this story reminds me of a storyline in "Franken Fran," where a neat freak corporate exec who is deathly afraid of roaches is horribly burned, then Fran replaces her skin with skin grown on the chitin of cockroaches.
This research was being done by a company called "Nexia Technologies", which unfortunately went bankrupt. One might ask what happened to the goats. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research took an interest and rescued them. There is an interesting story associated with that at The Story of the Transgenic Goats (continued).
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann
Scientists have done this with dragonflies: Giant Dragonflies.
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann