Last night I was watching Monster Garage on TLC and they kept giving these little "factoids" at each break about black widow spiders.  One said that the US Army is developing bullet proof vests using black widow spider silk.  Anybody know anything about this craziness??  Sounds pretty neat if it's true....

--ZERO

i have heard something similar to that. but the sheer amount of spider silk that you would need is what is hampering efforts. spider silk is like 6 times stronger than steel or something like that. there was a show on the history channel not too long ago that dealt with spider silk.

why black widow spider silk?
because it sounds scary.

[lol]

Not crazy at all. Spider silk is many times stronger than steel or kevlar for a given weight/thickness. Theres a spider (in So. America I think) that makes silk so strong they estimate a vest made of it would only weigh a few ounces and provide the same or better protection than vests currently available.

The Army has been researching this for a number of years. The problem is getting enough of the silk, an no matter how hard they try, the Army can't get the spiders to make their webs in the shape of a vest.

they need to get those spiders from the Matrix.

Yeah, but can they spin it in MARPAT?

[LOL] I crack me up.

They are jusing genetically modified goats to do this.  Somehow, the modified goats milk, when treated with a chemical and strained, produces the silk.  Pretty damn nifty if ya ask me.

What???? You got links on this?

KC

Do you expect me, the useless info king, to remember where I got every little tidbit of info??  I honestly cant remember where I got it.  May have been discovery or TLC but I am not sure.  I'll look this evening when I get off work.

Yeah, but then there's that kinetic energy to deal with...  How does the web disperse that?  Anyone know?

Scott

i remember that now. we must have watched the same program. don't remember what channel it was though TLC, TDC, or history one of those

It's these kinds of small discovered leaps in tech that really hold my interest.  What I'm really waiting for is nanotech to rapidly advance.  

--ZERO

the problem with spider silk is that it is sticky, and it adhears to itsilf well, which makes it very dificult to deal with when weaving and making it in to cloth.

may be black widow  silk isn't so sticky.

As I recall reading, there are two types, one that is sticky and the other which is not. But don't ask me exactly where I read it. I also read the thing about using goat's milk, but I can't remember where I saw that, either. Probably in some "Odd Science" feature on a major news site.

I aint wearing anything made from a spider! I hate spiders!  


i'll take current production stuff...so what if its heavier

I think your ribs take care of that.

And that reminds me of the TV blooper I saw where the TV newsman was demonstrating a new and wonderful "bulletproof" vest. He had someone stand a few feet in front of him and fire a .22 into the vest he was wearing.

"Oh shit!! That hurt!!" he screamed, and doubled over in pain.

Stupidity is its own reward.

Actually, the silk they are using is from the Golden Orb spider, it's the stongest silk. Black Widow silk is pretty fine in comparison. Golden Orb spiders aka Banana Spiders weave some tough stuff, I 've got dozeens around my place, be glad to send a few of the big hairy suckers to whoever would like one.

Heck Spiderman has been using the stuff for years. It's a swing, no it fixed the bridge, no it stops trains, no it's a net. You name it he's done it old news. [whacko]

That's what I was afraid of!  Ouch.  In that case, I wouldn't want the mere ounces...or maybe they could make one about as thick and absorbent as the "old" kevlar...which is bad enough!

Scott

[LOLabove]
[ROFL2][ROFL][LOL]

[url]http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/CuttingEdge/cuttingedge020118.html[/url]
[url]http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/article.cfm?Id=255[/url]

Lots of cool possibilties from this, everything from body armor to surgical repair of tendons and such.

That's correct.  The strands radiating outward in a web do not have the sticky droplets on them.  The circular strands do.  Even a spider can get stuck in it's own web if it walks on the wrong strands.

Old, old news. Very, very old.

Silk has been used since the beginning of the 20th century as a bullet resistant fiber. Expense was the biggest problem. Silk cost so much that it wasn't cost-effective to mass-produce it for use in vests and garments.

The Swiss made and issued bullet and fragment resistant cloaks for a time for issue to their troops, but again expense was too great.

During the Prohibition era, soft body armor became fairly popular among the gangster element in this country, because they were the only ones who could afford it. because of increasing numbers of gangsters wearing silk body armor, the FBI commissioned the development of the .38 Super round in 1911-framed pistols specifically to defeat soft armor of the time.

Kevlar itself is an "Aramid" fiber, or one that mimics the properties of silk. Because its base material is the smae kind of long-chain polymers that make nylon, Kevlar, and the earlier variants therof, became cheap enough that military and law enforcement entities could afford to use the material for soft body armor.

Some newer bullet resistant fibers, like Spectrshield (and I think Twaron[sp?]) are "non-aramid" fibers. Bulk is often a "good" thing in non-concealable armor, anyway. I suffer trauam from falling over stuff on tactical missions more often (as in about every other time) than I have been shot at (once), and the protection from blunt force trauma by being "armored up" is a consideration.

Silk is obsolete.

[url]http://www.smalltimes.com/document_display.cfm?document_id=6204[/url]

Spinning a 100meter long carbon nanotube monofiliment puts it way ahead of the longest bit of artificial spider silk they have managed to get.

And its 4 times stronger.

and we all know what consists of carbon... diamonds...

So does pencil graphite.  What's your point?

Carbon can either be a soft substance, or the hardest material on earth (which, by the way, breaks back down into graphite over time.)

If any of you are ready to get back in the stock market for the long term. CNI is a company that has great promise over the next couple decades. This whole field has great promise, if you are willing to be patient.

[img]http://www.xs4all.nl/~ednieuw/Spiders/loopspin.gif[/img]

Ah, transgenic goats.

I wonder why they didn't try a less complex system like insect cell expression.

Seems to me that the protein/ proteins would be overly modified or altered in the mammalian system, and it would be difficult to isolate/purify the proteins from milk.

It is possible to insert genes of interest into an insect virus that can infect commercially grown insect cells and produce the protein of interest, which is a much simpler system and the proteins are easier to purify.

Course, these guys published in Science, so they must have some idea what they are doing.

Biotechnology is Cool.