100 — Spider silk reinforced by graphene or carbon nanotubes

Today’s the 100th post! Alas, it’ll be brief, because I’m at AWS re:invent and I have to go stand in a line for a week.

This research sounds like Not A Real Thing so I knew I had to read this paper.

Spider silk is notoriously strong, and its many other features like biodegradability and thermal conductivity make it a very powerful and interesting material for a variety of uses in the medical, military, or automotive fields. Spider silk even outperforms human-engineered threads like kevlar.

Lepore et al fed spiders with food laced with graphene or carbon nanotubes and tested the resulting silk against the silk produced in absence of these compounds.

Nearly a quarter of the spiders died during the study (which is maybe a bad sign but I don’t know anything about research-spider survival rights).

The resulting dragline silk produced by the “enhanced” spiders were stronger and tougher than conventional spider silks (and therefore much tougher than manmade fibers).

This is interesting for use in medical stitching or the production of bulletproof vests. But of course, this work requires a ton of silk, and a ton of spiders. That seems like a production challenge, but I imagine feeding and housing spiders is much easier than the energy required to produce the fibers in other ways.