Spiders Ingest Nanotubes, Then Weave Silk Reinforced with Carbon

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/537301/spiders-ingest-nanotubes-then-weave-silk-reinforced-with-carbon/

by lelf • 11 years ago

272 78 11 years ago

tehchromic• 11 years ago

I don't know if it's a function of thickness, or if they've beaten these researchers to the punch, but black widow spiders spin by far the strongest thread I have ever encountered. There's never any doubt when I encounter a black widow web, and that's how I know to proceed with caution, when I'm working in my garage on the next Google haha.

devindotcom2• 11 years ago

They might be twining multiple threads (each themselves consisting of multiple strands) together to make an especially strong dragline or something. The giant riverine orb spider is on record as making the strongest thread, but that might be under certain conditions (like what comes out of the spinnerette (sp?), no weaving allowed) or the like.

EGreg3• 11 years ago

Are you able to break their spidereb with your hands?

thaumasiotes2• 11 years ago

This isn't something I'd be willing to try, for a black widow web...

devindotcom2• 11 years ago

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... incorporated carbon nanotubes and graphene into their silk-spinning process? What?! What's the mechanism?! No one knows! Who would have guessed this would work? It sounds like a joke experiment they cooked up while waiting for the glassware to bake!

Hopefully a more rigorous study replicating and expanding on these results will appear. But it just blew my mind the way this particular science appeared.

DrStalker2• 11 years ago

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

JoshTriplett• 11 years ago

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

derefr2• 11 years ago

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.

zenocon• 11 years ago

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...?"

subnaught• 11 years ago

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

derefr2• 11 years ago

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.

vanderZwan• 11 years ago

somewhat like human mammary glands.

This reminds me of a story of dolphins, who apparently suffer a lot from mercury poisoning, mostly caused by the smog of unfiltered coal plants entering their ecosystem. One issue of mercury poisoning is that the body has no way to get rid of it - it gets stored in the fats, IIRC. Unless you're a mammalian mom. Then the body gets rid of mercury through your milk. Mercury is most lethal at the infant age. So in short, most dolphin mothers' firstborns die [0].

Anyway, perhaps the carbon fibers are actually toxic, and the only way the spiders can get rid of the material is through their silk?

[0] http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/02/11/revealing-cove-do...

minopret• 11 years ago

Who would have guessed

Except for not being a dog, such a spider is anticipated in Goethe's little poem «Annonce» (Advertisement):

    A little dog is sought
    that never barked nor bit
    takes broken glass as feed
    leaves diamonds as - -

(my own translation, but wouldn't be surprised if it has appeared in these words before)

flashman• 11 years ago

Yeah, pretty good!

    Ein Hündchen wird gesucht,
    Das weder murrt, noch beißt,
    Zerbrochene Gläser frißt
    Und Diamanten scheißt.

tajen2• 11 years ago

Nice discovery and thank you for sharing it. Concerning the article, there are a lot of superlatives which sometimes makes me wonder whether the author is overenthusiastic and still rational; Therefore a couple of comparions would be welcome for people who didn't study material resistance, e.g. "Such a web can hold a 2kg spade if it happens to hang in your garage". Can it?

Kliment• 11 years ago

I agree, so I asked my material scientist friend. Based on the strand thickness in that microscope image being approximately 8 microns, a single strand can hold about 250g. So a web would probably hold a spade, depending on how well it sticks. Incidentally, if you need a material scientist, OracleCarbon hangs out in IRC in #xkcd on the Foonetic network and is happy to answer stuff like that.

thaumasiotes2• 11 years ago

Who would have guessed this would work?

A lot of people? The carbon has to end up somewhere. I don't see this as surprising at all, any more than it's surprising that if you, a human, eat a lot of arsenic, you'll add some of it to your hair. Growing hair and growing silk are not fundamentally different activities.

madaxe_again• 11 years ago

This is fascinating stuff - now they just need to feed genetically modified spider-goats graphene and see what happens!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16554357

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioSteel

karmakaze• 11 years ago

Just when I'm full up on superhero themes it gets all interesting again.

posnet• 11 years ago

Peter parker was just your average day Pholcidae spider, until one fateful day when he was exposed to experimental carbon nano-tubes. Now he must decide, will he use his new found super web powers for good, or for personal gain?

qbrass• 11 years ago

Time to make another movie reboot.

knorby• 11 years ago

"Spiderman and the Space Elevator"

nathan_long• 11 years ago

I'm just imagining the poor spiders that can't cut down their own webs when they want to re-weave them, or accidentally catch birds.

chrisfarms3• 11 years ago

Skitter[1] would have been all over this.

[1] http://worm.wikia.com/wiki/Taylor_Hebert

the8472• 11 years ago

“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.

Bluestrike2• 11 years ago

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...

e12e4• 11 years ago

But how about just natural silk with carbon nanotubes? Sure spidersilk is "the greatest" -- but maybe nano-augmented regular silk is better than, well regular silk?

[ed: insert dystopian sci-fi plot of scattered survivors of the nano apocalypse growing bullet proof vests from silk worms found in old industrial (nano)waste sites...]

gnoway• 11 years ago

This is sad, in a way; once I achieve my dream of exterminating all the spiders there won't be any left to spin this nanotube-reinforced fiber.

ionwake• 11 years ago

Unless the spiders start wearing spider nanotube silk weaved spider kevlar

zobzu• 11 years ago

Tldr its stronger than kevlar they say

Cool!

bdamm• 11 years ago

Strong enough for space elevator core?

aunty_helen• 11 years ago

What would a bunch of spiders do with a space elevator?

r00fus• 11 years ago

Laugh it up while the Ur-Quan take over the galaxy.

iamcurious• 11 years ago

Apparently not. From other comments:

cnvogel: it's assumed that materials with about 130 GPa of tensile strength would be needed for the "rope" of an space elevator

e12e: nanomagic spider silk: 5400 MPa (5.4 GPa)

ChuckMcM• 11 years ago

Ok that is pretty cool, combine it with this work (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-05/tum-ihs051010...) where folks are figuring out how to spin spider silk without the spiders, and you've got an interesting start.

shanev• 11 years ago

Goes to show that us humans aren't the best at making everything. Wish I thought of this when studying nanotechnology in grad school.

fit2rule2• 11 years ago

We're not the best at making anything. We're pretty good at using things, though.

corin_• 11 years ago

I'm not sure that's strictly true. I've not yet heard of another species as good as us at making, for example, cars, or computers.

smuser90• 11 years ago

“This new reinforcing procedure could also be applied to other animals and plants, leading to a new class of bionic materials,” they say.

Could it be applied to human stem cells or bone marrow? That'd be neat.

spevak• 11 years ago

Incredible. I bet the results could be improved even further with artificial selection to get spiders that are even better at incorporating carbon into their silk

e12e4• 11 years ago

So, for those that don't remember what "regular" spider silk is like, or kevlar:

  nanomagic spider silk:   5400 MPa (5.4 GPa)
  Spider silk:             1600 MPa
  Silkworm silk:            500 MPa
  Aramid
   (Kevlar or Twaron):     3620 MPa
  Steel:                    450 ~
                           2600 MPa

If I'm reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_tensile_strength correctly (and comparing the right numbers with the ones from the article...). At least kevlar seem to be in the same ballpark.

cnvogel2• 11 years ago

Interestingly the spider silk of 5.4 GPa has higher tensile strength than the specimens of "pure" carbon nanotubes of 2cm measured in labs at 3.6 GPa. The theoretical limit of cabon nanotubes is said to be at 300 GPa, and it's assumed that materials with about 130 GPa of tensile strength would be needed for the "rope" of an space elevator.

EGreg3• 11 years ago

Can a human actually break such a tiny web?

BurningFrog2• 11 years ago

Thanks. Those numbers were sorely missing from the article.

lotsofmangos2• 11 years ago

matching the toughness of state-of-the-art carbon fibers such as Kevlar

I don't think I would call kevlar a carbon fiber, is more like nylon.

vermooten• 11 years ago

Wake up sheeple! Isn't this exactly how the Arachnids of Klendathu came into being?

superplussed• 11 years ago

The most interesting part of the article for me was:

"Nobody has discovered an efficient way to harvest spider silk, although not for lack of trying. "

I would love to know more about these attempts. Searching google brings up doesn't help much as the keywords "mine" and "web" can have a wholly different connotation.

2muchcoffeeman• 11 years ago

Story of how they weaved the only spider silk rug in the world.

Spider Wranglers Weave One-Of-A-Kind Tapestry http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1132233...

bitwize2• 11 years ago

The efficient way is to genetically-engineer goats to produce the silk from their teats.

thomax• 11 years ago

So what happens when these spiders start reinforcing their exoskeletons with the ingested nanomaterial? Angry, eight-legged predators in ultratough kevlar, shooting indestructible web, that's what :)

BurningFrog2• 11 years ago

Just add some mood enhancers to the fiber soup to counteract the angriness.

mrfusion• 11 years ago

Are these strong enough to build a space elevator?

timboslice2• 11 years ago

From other comments:

cnvogel: it's assumed that materials with about 130 GPa of tensile strength would be needed for the "rope" of an space elevator

e12e: nanomagic spider silk: 5400 MPa (5.4 GPa)

chrisfarms3• 11 years ago

    > exactly how the spiders incorporate carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes into their silk is not clear

This confuses me. Surely they must've had some kind of hypothesis for this, or are they just going around spraying all kinds of creatures hoping they gain super-powers?

dedward2• 11 years ago

Well, spiders eat stuff, and poop out magic thread.

So change their diet, you change the thread...

chrisfarms3• 11 years ago

Luckily for all those times I've walked face first into a spider's web:

Spider silk != Poop

bitwize2• 11 years ago

I smell an origin story for Peter Parker's web shooters in the upcoming second Spider-Man reboot.

JeffreyKaine• 11 years ago

FINALLY, A SPIDERMAN QUOTE.

Seriously, I've been reading every comment. It took me almost 20 minutes to find a spiderman reference. Frankly, that's surprising...

an4rchy• 11 years ago

So it basically looks like whatever the spider consumes (as food?), it will incorporate into its silk if not needed. In the interest of science, might be interesting to try different food coloring, spices/aromas based sprays to see if that would make the spider silk more colorful or create fragrant webs -- Also, this could be a special evolutionary trait to attract food (right aroma/color?)

ahains• 11 years ago

This is SO cool. I'm going to start adding nanotubes to my morning coffee so I can write the unbreakable codez!

pvaldes• 11 years ago

And Pholcidae are not even the creators of the stronger webs in the world. With about 200.000 different types of spider silk in the planet, is really exciting to dream about what major league players like Nephila or Caerostris could achieve with this stuff.

stillsut• 11 years ago

It's not a bug it's a feature.

Spiders Ingest Nanotubes, Then Weave Silk Reinforced with Carbon

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