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Researchers Make Spiders Produce Silk Strengthened With Graphene
An anonymous reader writes: Italian researchers in Trent have enabled 15 Pholcidae spiders to spin graphene-strengthened dragline silk just by spraying them with a solution containing carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes. The resulting fiber is as strong as Kevlar 49, and ranks among the most resilient and ductile in the world of manufacturing. But Emiliano Lepore's research has not succeeded in understanding by what process the spiders are able to incorporate the ambient materials into their webs. Since spider-farming is historically unproductive, the possibility of continuing the research on silk-worms has been presented.
Did you get the spiders from Marvel?
Have they tried incubating the spider eggs in childrens ears?
Aside from the overtly disconcerting possibilities of nanotechnology-augmented spiders; does it strike anyone else as a matter for some potential concern that at least some organisms are quite permeable indeed to novel carbon structures?
Spider farming is unproductive? Man, they should see one of the places I lived. Spiders everywhere!
Italian researchers in Trent have enabled...
Grow bigger spiders.
Since spider-farming is historically unproductive
That's a really odd way to spell "nightmare fuel".
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
I,for one, welcome our new spider overlords.
it is located under my house and is very productive, year after year.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
A story about bitcoin or a short novella by reader Bennett
Skin appears solid and like a wall but in reality, it is very porous.
You're likely just as permeable to small discrete carbon structures as those spiders.
To put it more blatantly, nicotine patches work because nicotine is absorbed through the layers of skin. Thus anything the size of a nicotine molecule can find its way into your body. Similarly if you laid in a bath of alcohol for long enough, you could get drunk by the body absorbing alcohol through your skin.
All hail our new graphene augmented spider overlords!!!
and dog, they may very well end up caught in the spider web!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Theres a B horror movie in here somewhere.
The data is so scattered and the scientist try so hard to make a point. Some increase and some decrease in strength. Selecting that data which fits the hypothesis is an easy task. Maybe only a random observation if not worse.
Why should spiders build the material into the fiber and why should it make the spider silk stronger?
Space elevator, here we come... in a few hundred more years
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... welcome our new spider overlords.
-- Gaxx
It seems that if you use a sewer treatment plant as a spider farm you will get much better results.
But is it strong enough to build a space elevator? That is the killer app for high-tensile-strength materials.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I think the adjectives "creepy" and "disturbing" come to mind long before "unproductive" when hearing of "spider farming".
Now imagine a Beowu-- err, braided length of that!
Since spider-farming is historically unproductive,
Not if you're a dwarf living in a fortress that somehow managed to capture a giant cave spider.
Spray them with mint and you get floss.
From the far side Spiders on the slide..."If we pull this off... we eat like kings" http://i48.photobucket.com/alb...
is Graphene Fiber-Spider-Man!