Spider silk can be made stronger by feeding the spiders that produce the silk aqueous dispersions containing graphene or carbon nanotubes:
[Researchers] in Italy and the UK have found a way to make [spider] silk a lot stronger, using various different spider species and carbon nanotubes or graphene. The research team, led by Professor Nicola Pugno at the University of Trento, Italy, succeeded in having their spiders produce silk with up to three times the strength and ten times the toughness of the regular material.
[...] "We already know that there are biominerals present in in the protein matrices and hard tissues of insects, which gives them high strength and hardness in their jaws, mandibles and teeth, for example. So our study looked at whether spider silk's properties could be 'enhanced' by artificially incorporating various different nanomaterials into the silk's biological protein structures."
To do this, the team exposed three different spider species to water dispersions containing carbon nanotubes or graphene. After collecting the spiders' silk, the team tested its tensile strength and toughness. Professor Pugno said: "We found that the strongest silk the spiders spun had a fracture strength up to 5.4 gigapascals (GPa), and a toughness modulus up to 1,570 joules per gram (J/g). Normal spider silk, by comparison, has a fracture strength of around 1.5 GPa and a toughness modulus of around 150 J/g.
Spider silk reinforced by graphene or carbon nanotubes (DOI: 10.1088/2053-1583/aa7cd3) (DX)
Related: The Strongest Natural Material: Sea Snail Teeth
Synthetic Spider Silk Fiber Created
(Score: 2, Disagree) by c0lo on Thursday August 17 2017, @10:28AM (3 children)
(checking once again - spiders, yeap, nanotubes yeap. Ok, this time is not the wrong story)
https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=21825¬e=&title=Nanotube+spider+silk+article+is+a+dupe+from+2015. [soylentnews.org] [soylentnews.org]
Really really now - isn't a good time to implement a "pre-editing comments section"? Not the greensite's Firehose with modding the stories, but something to crowd-source the editorializing process.
I don't know, something like the "Soylenter Mechanical editor" - not editors by themselves, but can contribute with corrections, additions, dupe signalling, "this is big, should be breaking, push it sooner".
Chime in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 17 2017, @10:31AM (2 children)
LETTER
Spider silk reinforced by graphene or carbon nanotubes
Emiliano Lepore1, Federico Bosia2, Francesco Bonaccorso3,4, Matteo Bruna3, Simone Taioli5,6, Giovanni Garberoglio5, Andrea C Ferrari3 and Nicola Maria Pugno1,7,8
Published 14 August 2017 • © 2017 IOP Publishing Ltd
2D Materials, Volume 4, Number 3
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Thursday August 17 2017, @12:00PM (1 child)
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Thursday August 17 2017, @12:13PM
They boosted the toughness modulus by 3!!!111!
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]