Spider spraying carbon material spit out super wire

Italian researchers recently discovered that spraying common carbon spiders with nano-materials can produce super-strong filaments that are 3.5 times stronger than the best known spider silk.

Nicholas Pugnot of the University of Trento and his team collected 15 spiders. They sprayed a mixture of graphene and water on 5 of them, and the other 10 used carbon nanotubes and water. Mixture spray, as a control group to observe the effect of the two materials. If you fear that the nanomaterial coating will threaten the life of the spider, you are right - 4 of them immediately died. Among the surviving spiders, several spit silks were of poor quality, while others spit out silk containing spray material after a short period of adjustment. These carbon-infused spiders are super tough, and the spit emitted by a spider that sprays carbon nanotubes is stronger than the current silk spider's toughness record holder, giant river ball spider spit. 3.5 times.

Theoretically, when spiders spit silk, they will find suitable materials (whether they are eaten or absorbed) from the environment. People can control the texture of spider silk by controlling the external environment. The researchers did not know what form of graphene and carbon nanotubes was incorporated into the spider silk, but the carbon-containing spider silk did indeed originate from the spider's stomach. One possibility is that carbon is directly wrapped around the wire, but Pognno does not think it is sufficient to enhance the strength of the wire. Instead, he firmly believes that spiders sweep the material in the environment and incorporate it into silk during the process of spinning.

Limited experience means that follow-up research and replication activities must be based on clearly defined mechanisms. Researchers believe that this super strong spider silk can only be produced in small batches, and the specific and specific uses are still unknown, but "this method can be extended to other animals and plants, can cause a new type of biomimetic material terminal application". According to the "New Scientist" report, articles describing this method have recently been submitted to the prepublished biologists' website arXiv. (Reporter Fang Linlin)