Complex Numbers

Thwip

Here's a great example of science imitating art. From Wired:

    Science Has Spun Spider-Man’s Web-Slinging Into Reality  
When a US research lab accidentally created a sticky, web-like substance, it turned to Peter Parker and comic-book lore for inspiration on what to do next.

The original Spider-Man had Parker sciencing up his own web-shooters and web fluid, which was less a metaphor for puberty and more a comic book shortcut to giving him web powers that weren't inherently gross. Unrealistic? Sure, but so is everything else in comic books, including getting superpowers from being bitten by a radioactive spider, and that's okay.

Slowly but surely, we are making good on the gadgets we imagined, as kids, that the future would hold.

And yet, no phasers.

The Starfleet tricorder from Star Trek? Almost there. But web-shooting? Web-slinging? That wasn't one we really thought would make the crossover.

Yeah, I gotta agree on that one.

And it wasn't exactly in the plans for the scientist who has made the strong, sticky, air-spun web a reality either, Marco Lo Presti, from Tufts University’s Silklab.

Okay, but Silklab definitely sounds like a superhero hangout. Or maybe a supervillain lair. A very smooth one.

Fio is Fiorenzo Omenetto, professor of engineering at Tufts and “puppeteer” of the Silklab.

Oh, definitely supervillain lair.

“You explore and you play and you sort of connect the dots. Part of the play that is very underestimated is where you say ‘hey, wait a second, is this like a Spider-Man thing?’ And you brush it off at first, but a material that mimics superpowers is always a very, very good thing.”

What? No! It's a very, very bad thing in the hands of supervillains.

A lot of the Silklab’s work is “bio-inspired” by spiders and silkworms, mussels and barnacles, velvet worm slime, even tropical orchids—so working out whether this sticky web could become something useful might seem like an easy side-step for the team.

Velvet Worm Slime definitely needs to be the name of a band. Probably an emo/punk/EDM one.

In Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s original 1960s comic books, starting with Amazing Fantasy #15, Peter Parker builds a “little device,” one fastened to each wrist and triggered by finger pressure, to produce strands of ejectable ‘spider webs.’ By the time of the mid-2000s Sam Raimi Spider-Man films, the web-shooting switched from a wrist-worn spinneret gadget to an organic part of his superhero transformation.

And we've never let Raimi hear the end of puberty jokes since.

The article describes the web-fluid development in more detail; of course, despite the hype, we're not going to get friendly neighborhood web-slingers anytime soon, if at all.

So, Spider-Man capabilities when? “Everybody wants to know if we're going to be able to swing from buildings,” says Omenetto with a wry smile. But we're not there yet—so far the Silklab team itself has speculated about some potential uses for the material: the retrieval of an object that’s lost underwater, perhaps, or a drone that captures something in a remote environment.

When I was a kid, there was this sticky goo that would stretch but hold together, and you could use it to pick up pennies off the sidewalk, at least until it got too dirty to be useful. This doesn't seem much more useful than that goo, at least not yet.

Lo Presti is interested to hear from anyone who has read his paper and thinks they might be in need of a web-shooting silk fiber.

"Hello, I am an aspiring supervillain and I am in need of a web-shooting silk fiber to achieve my plans of world domination."

Some humans are pretty clever, though, and I'll bet they'll find uses for this that don't involve costumed vigilantes swinging from skyscrapers. Still, I do appreciate the comic-book theme here.