slowly but surely When we were kids, we imagined the gadgets we would have in the future. Penny Brown’s Video Watch Inspector gadget? Check. from Star Trek? Almost there. But cyber shooting? Online playback? that's not us real Thoughts will become cross-border. That's not the plan for the scientists who made Tufts University's Silklab's powerful, viscous air network a reality.

Back in 2020, Lo Presti, a research assistant professor of biomedical engineering, worked on the challenge of underwater adhesives. The first material he chose to use was composed of silk and dopamine, a popular combination because it mimics the way mussels adhere firmly to rock surfaces in the water, which could be useful in other applications.

He said: "While using acetone to clean glassware of this silk and dopamine substance, I noticed that it was transitioning to a solid format, turning into a material that looked like fibers. I showed Fio the vial and we started immediately Think about how to make remote adhesives—substances that stick to objects from a distance—made from them.”

Fio is Fiorenzo Amenetto, Tufts engineering professor and Silklab’s “puppet.” "What we like to say is that every experiment is planned hard with equations and a lot of forward thinking, but it's really about connections," he said. "You explore and play and then you connect the dots. Part of the script was What’s underestimated is you say, “Hey, wait a minute, is this like Spider-Man? "You brush it off first, but a kind of imitation of a superpower is always a very, very good thing."

Before Lo Presti could turn his attention to these unexpected webs, though, he had to finish the paper on an underwater adhesive using biomolecules, which he did in 2021. Much of Silklab's work is "bio-inspired" by spiders and silkworms, mussels and barnacles, velvet worms, and even tropical orchids - so figuring out whether this sticky web can be turned into something useful will be interesting to the team. It seems easy to say.

However, Lo Presti noted that while the new material does mimic spider threads, "there is no spider capable of popping up to shoot a stream of solution that turns into fibers and enables long-range capture of distant objects." This is something new, at least for the real world.

However, as the research paper in Advanced Feature Materials points out - enter fictitious characters. In the original 1960s comic book by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko Amazing Fantasy #15Peter Parker built a "little device," a device that affixed to each wrist and was triggered by finger pressure to create strands of pop-able "spider webs." to Sam Raimi in the mid-2000s spiderman movie, the web shooter transformed from a rotating gadget on his wrist to an organic part of his superhero transformation.