Making spiderman's webshooter

Webs of silk shoot from Spiderman’s wrist and drag the plunging train back to the safety of the track. Spiderman may be fiction, but his webs are not. Nature’s strongest material. Silk is produced by the humble spider, and being six times stronger than our finest steel, it really could stop a moving train with ease. However, despite our best efforts, humans still haven’t managed to reproduce it, until now. Using a device that mimics the spiders own web making machinery, scientists have produced a material that replicates silk in every way…but its strength. But, how did our scientists know they hadn’t quite conquered nature yet?

Obviously, our silk making scientists needed to test this new material. It may have looked like silk but they couldn’t be sure whether it shared its strong properties without some experimenting. It was quite simple really. They stretched it. In Physics, when we stretch something we say we are applying a tensile force. I don’t know why we give simple things complicated names either, so work with me. Stretching is tensile. A stretching force is a tensile force. So, lets practice our physics language.

Scientists applied a tensile force to the artificial silk.

Then they wrote down two numbers. The first was how much force was applied. Did they tug a lot or a little? Lets say this in Physics talk. How large a tensile force did the scientists apply? They called this this number the stress. Specifically, the tensile stress (If we’d applied a different sort of force instead of stretching it would be a different type of stress). The second number they wrote down was the opposite of stress. Strain. The tensile strain is how much the silk stretched e.g. how much did its length change in response to the stress they applied.

Unfortunately for our scientists, the stress that their silk could take before it snapped fell way short of the maximum stress of spiders silk. But, it was one step closer compared to any other man made silk so far. Not much help if you’re currently in that train falling off the cliff I suppose. I’ll keep you posted for when those are safe.