Superhero science IRL

Katrina Borthwick - 29 October 2024

My eldest daughter is Spider-Man crazy. She has the shoes, bag, outfit, and our house has stickers…so many stickers…

My daughter and Spider-Man

So, imagine my delight when I stumbled upon a recent development by scientists that looks to be Spider-Man inspired web slinging tech.

The researchers had fun shooting a long length of web from a needle, and picking up objects with it. Despite what you might think from the research paper’s title (Dynamic Adhesive Fibers for Remote Capturing of Objects), this is actually very cool.

The web itself is made of liquid containing silk fibroin and chitosan, that is then mixed with another liquid containing a solvent (acetone) and dopamine. When the two liquids mix, it forms a solid length of web very quickly.

The silk fibroin is basically boiled silk moth cocoons. It gives the web its form, base tensile strength and stickiness. The chitosan mixed with it is derived from insect exoskeletons, and increases the web strength 200 times. The solvent helps the liquid dry out quickly, and the dopamine accelerates the transition from liquid to solid.

To achieve this, the silk and solvent solutions must be kept separate and mixed while the web is in flight. Otherwise, it would just turn into a solid lump of goo before release. To do this they used a coaxial needle, which has two concentric standard needles one inside the other. These needles already exist for other applications, including 3D printing (including bioprinting) and surgical procedures. The two liquids are shot out at the same time, with the silk solution in the centre and the solvent mixture surrounding it. Once released the magic happens, and a solid length of web is formed and sticks to whatever it was aimed at.

The researchers in the lab have picked up a scalpel partly buried in sand, bolts, and a floating test tube from a distance of 12 centimetres. The video below shows how it works. A bit of scaling up (and a slightly sexier camera angle) is needed before we will be able to use this to confidently swing from tall buildings, but the base tech is there. At the moment it looks a bit more like a booger than a web.

What we wanted vs What we got.

Also interesting to note, real spiders don’t actually shoot their webs out. They excrete the web from their glands and let it sort of fall out. Probably something we should be grateful for.

So, what other superhero tech is out there?

Climbing walls

While we’re on Spidey tech, it’s worth mentioning the gecko inspired technology that uses silicone micro-wedges which imitate gecko hair, loaded onto springs to create an even weight distribution. Using it, a 70kg Ph.D. student ascended 3.6m up a glass wall behind his lab. He reckons he could have got to the top, but was getting tired – and maybe he lost his nerve? The problem is that this device doesn’t self-clean like a gecko does, so grit and sand is going to cause the user to fall off over time. Which seems to be a waste of valuable Ph.D. students.

NASA wants to put the pads on robots, so they can use them to catch space junk. They’ve already managed to get a bot to grip the solar panel of another 400kg robot in zero g and pull it in another direction using this tech. So there’s proof of concept already.

Exosuits and jet packs

Believe it or not, the Australian army is already using exosuit technology to boost the strength of its soldiers. Their exosuits reduce fatigue and muscle strain by 40 per cent, using elastic bands that stretch as muscles extend and recoil as they contract. They assist in bending and reducing strain. There are also others working on exosuits around the world. Harvard is working on soft exosuits in their Biodesign Lab, which are basically wearable robots.

Self-healing

No, Wolverine tech isn’t here yet, but the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has talked about a pharmaceutical company called ElectRx who is looking to develop tiny injectable miniature implants that would continually monitor a person’s physical condition and provide electric stimulus to any systems in need. They’ve proposed targeting chronic inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis. I’m not sure where this landed eventually, as this was a while back, but it’s worth keeping an eye out for.

Invisibility

How about an invisibility cloak? It’d be pretty handy for a superhero (or maybe even a wizard), I would have thought.

One of the solutions being worked on uses a coating of metamaterials and nanotech lenses to bend wavelengths of light around the object – so you see what is behind it instead of the object. There are a lot of wavelengths of visible light, which has made it tricky. Beings with two eyes and stereoscopic vision like us also make it harder – as the light needs to be directed properly – or else we will still see the edges of things, due to the slightly different view each eye gives us.

X-ray vision

Of course, any mention of superpowers wouldn’t be complete without X-ray vision. While we are unlikely to ever allow x-rays to be beamed at people randomly at any time in the future, a solution may lie with augmented reality (AR). The tech uses wireless signals and computer vision to enable users to perceive things that are invisible to the human eye. It then overlays this on top of the real image through an AR headset. However, when I last checked it out, the users were just finding RF tagged objects, so I feel that’s a bit cheaty.

Teleportation – not so much

So far teleportation (like Nightcrawler) isn’t looking too promising, and what has been mooted so far doesn’t sound so great.

To avoid the rule saying ‘nothing can travel faster than the speed of light’, the thinking is we could send information instead. For example, through quantum entangled particles. That would mean we may eventually devise a technology where we can create an exact copy of ourselves elsewhere, even down to our brainwaves, and ‘delete’ the original. The teleported ‘you’ has moved, and feels everything is normal and moves on with life in the new location.

Although this may serve the purpose, in my opinion you end up kinda dead.

Also, due to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, in reality we don’t know where all the parts of atoms are all the time – so whatever arrives could be a bit messed up.

Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.

Bye for now.