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Spiders Ingest Nanotubes, Then Weave Silk Reinforced with Carbon

technologyreview.com

11–20 of 84 posts

Re: Spiders Ingest Nanotubes, Then Weave Silk Reinforced with Carbon

#11
post #6

> “This new reinforcing procedure could also be applied to other animals and plants, leading to a new class of bionic materials,” how about silk worms? at least we know how to handle those in bulk.

There's a lot of effort going into just that, though there are some stumbling blocks researchers are still working their way through before we start seeing production scaled up.

http://news.discovery.com/tech/spider-silk-silkworms-genetic...

Re: Spiders Ingest Nanotubes, Then Weave Silk Reinforced with Carbon

#12

I just wrote this up myself. The results are remarkable, but the credit seems entirely due to the spiders. Well, not entirely, but the data is so limited! They only got a handful of spiders, from the lab's back yard essentially, and a bunch of them died from nanomaterial exposure, malnutrition, or both after 1 trial! Yet despite the bargain bin trappings, the results are so incredibly cool! The spiders just... incorp…

[deleted]

Re: Spiders Ingest Nanotubes, Then Weave Silk Reinforced with Carbon

#13
post #12

I just wrote this up myself. The results are remarkable, but the credit seems entirely due to the spiders. Well, not entirely, but the data is so limited! They only got a handful of spiders, from the lab's back yard essentially, and a bunch of them died from nanomaterial exposure, malnutrition, or both after 1 trial! Yet despite the bargain bin trappings, the results are so incredibly cool! The spiders just... incorp…

[deleted]

nobody cares, the carbon-fiber diet is not genetic

Re: Spiders Ingest Nanotubes, Then Weave Silk Reinforced with Carbon

#14

I just wrote this up myself. The results are remarkable, but the credit seems entirely due to the spiders. Well, not entirely, but the data is so limited! They only got a handful of spiders, from the lab's back yard essentially, and a bunch of them died from nanomaterial exposure, malnutrition, or both after 1 trial! Yet despite the bargain bin trappings, the results are so incredibly cool! The spiders just... incorp…

Is there a word like serendipity that means "found as a joke" instead of "found by a fortunate accident?"

Re: Spiders Ingest Nanotubes, Then Weave Silk Reinforced with Carbon

#16

I just wrote this up myself. The results are remarkable, but the credit seems entirely due to the spiders. Well, not entirely, but the data is so limited! They only got a handful of spiders, from the lab's back yard essentially, and a bunch of them died from nanomaterial exposure, malnutrition, or both after 1 trial! Yet despite the bargain bin trappings, the results are so incredibly cool! The spiders just... incorp…

It seems this is how the most remarkable scientific discoveries happen, though -- purely by accident or as part of a wild trial "Hey, what if we just tried this...?"

Re: Spiders Ingest Nanotubes, Then Weave Silk Reinforced with Carbon

#17

I just wrote this up myself. The results are remarkable, but the credit seems entirely due to the spiders. Well, not entirely, but the data is so limited! They only got a handful of spiders, from the lab's back yard essentially, and a bunch of them died from nanomaterial exposure, malnutrition, or both after 1 trial! Yet despite the bargain bin trappings, the results are so incredibly cool! The spiders just... incorp…

This [1] is a pretty good description of the spider silk stucture. Turns out it's a self-assembled liquid crystal composed of oriented rods of a hydrophobic protein (an alanine/glycine co-polymer for those who care). It's not hard to imagine how a carbon nanotube could substitute for one of those if it's around in the soup...

[1] http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/spider/page3.htm

Re: Spiders Ingest Nanotubes, Then Weave Silk Reinforced with Carbon

#18

I just wrote this up myself. The results are remarkable, but the credit seems entirely due to the spiders. Well, not entirely, but the data is so limited! They only got a handful of spiders, from the lab's back yard essentially, and a bunch of them died from nanomaterial exposure, malnutrition, or both after 1 trial! Yet despite the bargain bin trappings, the results are so incredibly cool! The spiders just... incorp…

Is there a word like serendipity that means "found as a joke" instead of "found by a fortunate accident?"

Not a single word, but http://catb.org/jargon/html/H/ha-ha-only-serious.html is related.

Re: Spiders Ingest Nanotubes, Then Weave Silk Reinforced with Carbon

#19

I just wrote this up myself. The results are remarkable, but the credit seems entirely due to the spiders. Well, not entirely, but the data is so limited! They only got a handful of spiders, from the lab's back yard essentially, and a bunch of them died from nanomaterial exposure, malnutrition, or both after 1 trial! Yet despite the bargain bin trappings, the results are so incredibly cool! The spiders just... incorp…

A guess at the mechanism: the silk protein selection algorithm is an accept-first filter, the silk ducts being somewhat like human mammary glands. Anything the spider isn't specifically pulling back into its own blood as needed would then end up as an impurity in the webbing. (Easy experiment to do in its own right, but from a quick search I can't find evidence to support or refute it.)

Past that, the nanotubes just have to get locked into the matrix of the silk in the right orientation... which could just happen to anything of the right dimensionality in the silk as it anneals into shape.

Re: Spiders Ingest Nanotubes, Then Weave Silk Reinforced with Carbon

#20

I just wrote this up myself. The results are remarkable, but the credit seems entirely due to the spiders. Well, not entirely, but the data is so limited! They only got a handful of spiders, from the lab's back yard essentially, and a bunch of them died from nanomaterial exposure, malnutrition, or both after 1 trial! Yet despite the bargain bin trappings, the results are so incredibly cool! The spiders just... incorp…

Is there a word like serendipity that means "found as a joke" instead of "found by a fortunate accident?"

Not a word, per se, but this mechanism of discovery tends to correlate with being the sort of thing that wins an Ig Nobel prize.
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