He spun the web-slinging lore of Spider-Man into reality

slowly but surely, We make the tools that we, as children, imagined the future to be. Watch Benny Brown’s video Inspector Tools? Checks. Tricoder Starfleet of Star Trek? Almost there. But web shoots? Web move? This one wasn’t us truly Thought will make the intersection. And it wasn’t exactly in the plans of the scientist who made the strong, sticky Air-Spun web a reality, Marco Lo Presti, of Tufts University’s Silklab.

In 2020, Lo Presti, a research assistant professor of biomedical engineering, was working on the challenge of underwater adhesives. The first material he chose to work with was composed of silk and dopamine, a popular combination because it mimics the way mussels adhere firmly to surfaces in water – something that was useful in Other applications.

“While using acetone to clean glassware for this silky, dopamine-tinged material,” he says, “I noticed that it was undergoing a transition to a solid format, to a web-looking material, to something that looked like fibers. I showed them the Fio vials, and we immediately started thinking about how to make an adhesive.” at a distance (a substance that sticks to an object at a distance) from it.”

Fio is Fiorenzo Omenetto, an engineering professor at Tufts and Silklab’s “Puppeteer.” “We like to say that every experience is carefully planned with equations and a lot of thought but it’s really about communication,” he says. “You’re exploring as you play and connecting the dots. A part of the play that’s very underrated is where you say ‘Hey, wait a second, is this like Spider-Man?’ and you’re off at first, but material that mimics superpowers is always a good thing.” very. “

Before Lo Presti could turn his attention to these spin-offs, though, he had to complete it paper On underwater adhesives using biomolecules, which he did in 2021. Lots of Silklab work It is “bio-inspired” by spiders, ciliate worms, barnacle mussels, velvet worms, and even tropical orchids—so working if this sticky web might become something useful might seem like an easy side step for the team.

However, Lo Presti points out that although the new material mimics spider threads, “there is no spider capable of ejecting, of shooting a solution out of the solution, which turns into fibers and does the remote capture of a distant object.” This was something new, to the real world at least.

But as a research paper on Advanced functional materials Notes – Enter fictional characters. In the original books by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in the 1960s, starting with Amazing Fantasy #15Peter Parker builds “small devices”, one mounted on each wrist and operated by finger pressure, to produce strands of attached “spider webs”. By the time of mid-2000 Sam Raimi Spider Man Movies, Web Shooting went from a wrist-spawning Spinneret to an organic part of his superhero transformation.