Making cloth from spider silk | Hacker News Reader

Making cloth from spider silk

nytimes.com

45 pointsgcv16 comments

[Golden orb spider silk is] five to six times stronger than steel by weight...

Insanely cool.

If you look at steel under a microscope you see discontinuities, and grains and other things.

Spider silk however is totally uniform and made almost atom by atom, that's why it's so much stronger. I believe it's even stronger than kevlar.

IIRC it isn't stronger than kevlar, it's roughly equal, however many of the properties of spider silk are more desirable. I believe the first is that it is more elastic than kevlar, allowing it to more easily absorb the impact of a bullet and spread the load. It is significantly more flexible than kevlar, meaning it can be used to make fully armoured bodysuits (instead of using overlapping plates), quite literally pants and jackets could be made out of it comfortably.

Spider silk also has one bonus benefit to it in that it's antiseptic, but it also supposedly binds into a wound preventing bleeding and acting as a natural gauze. This would mean that not only could it save your life by stopping the bullet, but if you got knifed you could actually use your body armour as a first aid kit.

Whatever happened to that company that was going to create spider silk in bulk using the milk from genetically engineered goats? That was a big story about five or six years ago but I haven't heard anything since. Sure sounds easier than putting spiders in tiny harnesses.

I had forgotten about those goats. Would be a hell of a lot friendlier than handing giant spiders. Creeps me out

Giant cannibalistic don't-work-when-its-raining spiders.

Yes, but then you've got to deal with intelligent animals that can open doors (they have prehensile lips and will learn doorhandles by observation), climb trees/buildings or vehicles and will learn to escape by whatever means possible and will teach each other no matter how complicated it can be (the most complicated I've heard of was up a tree, onto the shed, through another tree, onto the roof of a house, over the house, onto a pickup, onto a brick wall, along and onto the front wall and down; the person had to round up numerous goats before he saw a herd of them attempt the escape and cut down the two trees).

I'm unsure if spiders would be more difficult than a large herd of goats. I suppose the goats always have the added benefit that you could become a cashmere farmer on the side, I don't really see any profitability on the side for giant cannibalistic spiders except grinding them up for reptile food for an even zanier project down the road; perhaps for when they try to breed a dragon.

Perhaps it is my terror of spiders of any reasonable size, bit I had to read the first part of that several times until I realized it was goats with prehensile lips, not spiders.

Or that the spiders, cannibalistic and controlling were intelligent enough to teach each other how to escape.

Whew.

Last I heard they were having problems with the stability of the silk produced. Apparently it would start to break down within a month or two, losing all of it's unique tensile properties in the process...

I had a quick look around but couldn't find anything to back that up. The applications they mention on this page http://www.nexiabiotech.com/en/01_tech/01.php talk a few times about how 'biodegradable' the silk is though...

Biodegradable spider silk is pretty useless.

You would want to use it for things like suspension bridges, bullet proof vests, high tension electrical lines. Space tethers even maybe.

Things that are not disposable.

I have a hard time thinking of a disposable application for a fiber that is stronger than steel. Unless it was really really cheap.

On their website one of the first applications they listed was for sutures in eye surgery. Apparently the high initial tensile strength and biodegradability make it perfect for that.

I agree though that most of the interesting (and widespread) uses require a material that is not biodegradable.

I would love to have a spider-silk ballistic/stab vest... That would be a very cool piece of kit...

Looks like the thing didn't pan out for Nexia. IP has been sold for a percentage of future royalties. http://www.baystreet.ca/users/newswire/viewarticle.aspx?id=7... If only they'd learned how to make it shoot out an infinite stream of web from little nozzles in the palm of your hands...

Oh they did it the old fashioned way, neat but sadly not as interesting as gene splicing would have been. Gene splicing would make it possible to produce spider silk fabrics for less then one million.

We have spliced some spider silk protein genes into goats, and their milk does contain those proteins, and we can crystallize them into large crystals. But that's not silk, spider silk is those proteins carefully assembled along with H2O molecules to create threads.

Another problem is, spider silk tends to rot pretty quickly.

FTA: "...to show what Mr. Peers and Mr. Godley — along with more than a million spiders and a dexterous team of intrepid Malagasy spider handlers — had accomplished."

"...an endeavor that, as he has written, always seemed to be 'imbued with metaphor and poetry, with nightmare and phobia.'"

Yes. That.

So that's undyed? What a fantastic color. Yet again the inadequacies of digital interfaces driving me mad --- I want to see it! And (no doubt I'll never get the opportunity) touch it.

I'd like my VR now, please.

From the title I thought this would be about Dwarf Fortress.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com