In the field of robotics, the gecko excited people because their ability to climb walls is not based on the capillary or on the vacuum. There are a few animals in addition to spiders, such as geckos, who can also do this. One of Spider-Man’s powers is the ability to climb walls and buildings. But once it comes out you want it to be solidified, immediately, otherwise the material collapses, and you won’t be able to have a good print. In 3D printing, shear thinning is very important because when you print, you want the material to go through as a liquid, otherwise it will clog the nozzle. The biopolymer chains will stretch so they become disentangled and slip away from each other, and that’s why they can come out of the bottle. It’s difficult to get out of the bottle, so you shake it to shear the molecules in the ketchup, which decreases the viscosity. That’s why you create a certain kind of alignment of molecules.įor example, ketchup is a shear thinning material. Shear thinning means it is originally a stiff or highly viscous material, but if you shear it, it becomes less viscous and can be easily aligned in the shear direction. Spider-man’s synthetic web fluid is described as “a shear-thinning liquid” that “on contact with air, the long-chain polymer knits and forms an extremely tough, flexible fiber.” Is this a material that sounds realistic?Ībsolutely. This is something we are trying to do right now with origami/ kirigami structures: You’re not changing the material’s intrinsic property, just using cutting and folding as a tool, which brings an extra, previously unattainable level of design, dynamic, and deployability that make an initially rigid, unstretchable panel stretchable and foldable at any scale. Some researchers even argue that wind induces variations in spiderweb geometry. Having this kind of geometry is really important. If you have spider web in the wind, it can move around, but it doesn’t actually break part. And there are seven different types of glands that spiders produce to spin their silks.įurthermore, spiders are knitting these silks into orb webs of different kinds of geometry, and that’s also enhancing the strength. They are made of different proteins, which have different morphologies and orientations. Spider silk has multileveled structures, or hierarchy they are not made of a single type of proteins. You can bend an arm in one direction but not in another. It’s similar to your tendons, which all have directionality. There are different kinds of alignment of the silk protein strands, which is very critical. What makes spider silk such a “super” material? If we can understand why they behave this way, we can design a structure or design a chemistry to have similar functionality without taking hundreds of millions of years to make them, or taking laborious steps to make the same very sophisticated structures as biology does. ![]() Then we started to work with Dan Janzen and Alison Sweeney, and now we’re trying to understand convergence of biology and asking deeper questions: If you see the color, where’s the color coming from? Is it because of the morphology, or because of the chemistry? Within the same family of butterflies, why do they have different colors? Why do some plant leaves or seeds and butterfly wings have similar colors? Are they due to the same mechanism? Many years ago, we made iridescent opal-like colors and said, ‘We’re mimicking the biology they have these interesting colors and we’re mimicking butterfly wings,’ but without actually knowing how bioorganisms work and why they do so. When engineers see the incredible materials that come from biology, things like strong-yet-flexible muscle tendons, wall-climbing geckos, or spider silk, how do they approach the process of creating manmade materials with similar properties?īiologists and engineers definitely have to work together. Penn Today talked with materials scientist and engineer Shu Yang to learn more about the real-world versions of these “super” materials, and how engineers in her field are inspired by biology to create manmade materials with unique functions. Parker is also a scientifically-savvy hero, making his own costumes and gear, who continues to inspire audiences 57 years after he was originally brought to life by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.Īnd while radioactive spiders might not be lurking in labs giving unsuspecting students the ability to climb walls, Spider-Man’s superpowers and his synthetic webbing might not be completely out of reach. “Spider-Man: Far from Home” is the latest cinematic telling of the story of Peter Parker, the friendly neighborhood superhero who can climb up walls and is incredibly strong and agile. The summer movie season is already in full swing, with “ Avengers: Endgame” already earning more than $2.7 billion worldwide and many others hoping to cash in on global superhero excitement.
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