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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday June 30 2015, @10:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the side-of-nightmare-with-your-space-elevator dept.

Spiders sprayed with water containing carbon nanotubes and graphene flakes have produced the toughest fibers ever measured, say materials scientists.

Spider silk is one of the more extraordinary materials known to science. The protein fiber, spun by spiders to make webs, is stronger than almost anything that humans can make.

The dragline silk spiders use to make a web's outer rim and spokes is amazing stuff. It matches high-grade alloy steel for tensile strength but is about a sixth as dense. It is also highly ductile, sometimes capable of stretching to five times its length.

This combination of strength and ductility makes spider silk extremely tough, matching the toughness of state-of-the-art carbon fibers such as Kevlar.

No word in the article on how close to the necessary tensile strength for a space elevator they come. Or how quickly the spiders got cancer. But at least it's a simple process. I wonder if the same technique will work with silkworms, which are commercially viable (something that spiders aren't).


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @07:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @07:52PM (#203463)

    If spider silk is so god damn strong why can I tear it to shreds with my bare hands?

    Because you are only tearing a very thin wire of it. It's the same reason you can tear apart a string with your bare hands, but you can't tear apart a rope.

    I'm not sure it's even possible to make a wire of steel as light and thin as spider silk, but assuming you could it would break much more easily than spider silk. Alternatively if you could harvest however many spider silk threads you need to make a string, you'd find it much less easy to shred with your bare hands.

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