Nanoglue Could Be Used To Make Spiderman Web-Shooters 114
Stony Stevenson writes "A team of US researchers is using the super-adhesive properties of nanoglue to create a super-sticky web-shooting device much like the comic-book hero Spiderman's. The nanoglue is also being trialed in the production of computer chip circuitry and is expected to miniaturize the process, meaning faster and more powerful chips. From the article: '"If we can find a way to create threads and/or intertwined bundles using the molecules in a scalable fashion, while retaining the adhesive properties, then creating web-shooters similar to Spiderman's is a real possibility," Ramanath said. "There are ways in which molecular threads/bundles can be created in large quantities. The challenge will be, however, to simultaneously engineer adhesion on certain surfaces (and not others, since we want the suit only to form on the desired surface) and also with each other during the thread formation."'"
Important application (Score:1)
huh (Score:5, Funny)
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Original Journal Article (Score:5, Insightful)
While I do somewhat agree with the sentiment of the above poster that 'there are more important things that we could be working on', I think that it would be fair to remember that not ever scientist is suited to work on every project - to work on "cancer" (as it is so broadly put) you need certain kinds of scientists - i.e. biochemists, molecular & cellular biologists, organic & medicinal chemists, and pharmacists in order to do direct research on cancer. This fellow (G. Ramanath) is a materials engineer, and thus would be ill equipped to doing cancer-curing research.
However, it should be noted that the ability to DO cancer research is only made possible by discoveries in other areas of science - physics (radiation therapy, imaging methods), engineering (devising machines to test for and to visualize cancerous growths), chemistry (new ways to make and deliver drugs), materials science (better materials to do all of the above!) , computing science (imaging, modelling), and biochemistry & biology (understanding cellular processes) by those who are not aiming to cure diseases, but whom seek to advance the limits of human knowledge and understanding. Creating a better glue just happens to be one such advance that may help indirectly.
Re:huh (Score:4, Interesting)
Large fire in the city, building collapsing, people inside, spiderman web used to clear obstacles inside without getting close. Lives saved.
Priorities are great, but human diseases are not everything.
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Yeah, it was a joke...I thought it funny that some scientist somewhere might have a to-do list that went something like:
1. Take out garbage
2. Invent Spiderman-web slinger
3. Cure Cancer
Re:huh (Score:5, Insightful)
And secondly, are you seriously suggesting that humanity should give up all other pursuits in order to work on this problem? There are other diseases you know. And other problems that face humanity. Besides that, how do you know that this project, as frivolous as it may sound, may not produce some knowledge that will contribute to the treatment of disease?
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Look, I'm no friend of Big Pharma. Personally, I think all medical research should be government funded and the results public domain. All drugs should be generic.
I strongly suspect that curing AIDS at all may be impossible. It would take something on the order of 100% effective nanomachines that flood through the bloodstream killing all virus particles in the body, and
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I strongly suspect that curing AIDS at all may be impossible. It would take something on the order of 100% effective nanomachines that flood through the bloodstream killing all virus particles in the body, and searching through the genomes of all cells in the immune system and excising the HIV genome. That's how hard the problem is.
I agree the problem is tricky. But you're overstating it. Impossible is a huge word. Consider what we trivially do today that would certainly have been classified "impossible
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Of course, creating reverse chirality people carries with it the risk that someone might create reverse chirality viruses, but I think its significant to note that that is essentially the only way viruses would ever be able to affect those people.
They could also, in principle anyway, arise naturally. One way-chirality viruses have afterall, so there's no reason reverse ones couldn't. Other than that there's currently no suitable hosts for them. But if a large fraction of humanity was infact reverse-chir
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Yeah. It's another case of the same thing. You're thinking in terms of "likely to happen", and I do agree that naturally arising viruses with reverse chirality may be quite unlikely to happen. But in the extreme case -- life arose once, with *this* chirality. Assuming that chirality really is pretty much a random thing, there's no reason it couldn't arise again -- with oposite chirality by chance.
One earth there's the sligth problem that such life would then have to compete with existing life which has ra
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Not one company will break ranks and put a "cure" on the market, even though they're engaged in cutthroat competition with each other, because?
Hint: this kind of conspiracy mongering says more about your own character and mental status than it does about your target.
Hint
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That said, I was being facetious
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Yeah. But only in a noncompetitive market. There is *very* little treatment for N-1 companies to make in selling 'treatment programs' for a disease the moment the last company has a 'cure' on the market.
Which unfortunately doesn't match todays climate -- there is very little real competition on hard problems. Because the problems are hard enough that there simply isn't a lot of companies on the planet that can even hope to have a chance of solving them.
Aspirin and similar generic, easily-producable, unp
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No...it was a joke...I thought it funny that some scientist somewhere might have a to-do list that went something like:
1. Take out garbage
2. Invent Spiderman-web slinger
3. Cure Cancer
Materials Science (Score:4, Insightful)
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Everyone has their pet projects, and each can be argued as more important than the other, but in the end technology intended for one purpose benefits other areas as well.
This excludes NASA's research, which has produced nothing of applicable scientific or medic
It's not (Score:2)
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Why not each of us working on a cure for cancer?
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Sounds like they have some sticky problems ... (Score:2)
Not a sure thing yet, but... (Score:1)
"If we can find a way to create threads and/or intertwined bundles using the molecules in a scalable fashion, while retaining the adhesive properties..."
Alright, so it sounds like they're just using the spider-man analogy because it sounds cool... but if it's even remotely possible that I'll be swinging from buildings any time soon, just tell me where to throw my money!
*Disclaimer: as a starving student, I actually have no money to throw, but a guy can dream... right?
actually... (Score:3, Insightful)
well actually now that we have this super nano glue we can make better computer chips which make faster computers which biochemists can use to simulate proteins/enzymes involved in cancer so that is the idea... but really the spiderman thing does seem kind of silly now until you realize the awesomeness of swinging around places:)
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Don't underestimate the importance of being able to suddenly swing into different places. [xkcd.com]
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Compression (Score:3, Insightful)
Although since there was so much other knowledge of physics that had to be suspended, I managed to let it ride.
Re:Compression (Score:4, Interesting)
That's because you are assuming that the web is some sort of solid "rope". However, there are a lot of things on the market today that can expand to many times their original size. For example, there is expanding foam insulation that ends up many times larger than when it was applied. If the web was some sort of expanded "mesh", instead of a solid rope, you could get quite a bit of webbing inside the container.
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When he swings, every strand is what, 50 feet long or so? And he might use dozens or even hundreds of those between having to change. So that is anywhere from 500 to 5000 feet of rope, strong rope, inside of an inch wide canister. It doesn't seem likely. Slightly more likely than "unstable molecules", but still.
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(Now I'm sure *some* comic book geek is going to point out how Spiderman used webbing in space or something)
Uses the bodies own saline/fluids (Score:2)
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One of these things is in my pants.
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Store the liquid in a big codpeice with a hose to the arm. Maybe inside phoney pectorials also. And, it'll help spidey get laid.
Web strings compressed into a few inches (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y479OXBzCBQ [youtube.com]
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The cross-section needed to support a 50 kilogram man is quite different from that needed to support a 5 gram spider.
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Is there a real life example of something that could shoot a 20 foot rope out of an 8 ounce can that can support a light human being?
And then we are looking at something that can come out of a 1 to 3 ounce cannister that can shoot out up to a mile of super strong rope.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_String [wikipedia.org]
Length of Spider Web (Score:2)
Well, I tried a quick Google and couldn't find the linear length of a spider's web, but it has to be dozens of feet of material for web that gets rebuild every day - and most of those spiders have bodies on the order of a centimeter in diameter.
Did you ever do the experiment in organic chemistry where you make nylon in a flask? You can spend an hour twisting a string out of the liquid bath. Ah, here's
Spell it right! (Score:3, Informative)
Not only did they spell it wrong... (Score:1)
Oh boy... (Score:4, Funny)
Hmmm (Score:2, Funny)
Is it that easy? (Score:1, Insightful)
"We're convinced that, if this algorithm were part of the software powering a future cellular phone that could call a radio telescope to send a signal to a giant mass compressor orbitin
Blah... Been done in the 1970's... (Score:3, Interesting)
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No Broken Bones? (Score:2)
At least you found out before you went out the window...
Finally a reality.. (Score:4, Funny)
Finally these words are relevant: (Score:1, Funny)
Pffffft (Score:2, Funny)
This is just begging for an Urban Dictionary entry (Score:1)
Nanoglue - The translucent, cement-like substance, binding only the most important corners of one's magazine collection. Recent studies suggest a negative correlation between the quantity of this substance to the relative proximity tissue paper caches. However critics of this axiom find other factors common to this phenomenon such as the social constructs where electronic devices are not given any or unequal access to a roommate's "interweb connection". Causes of this temporary condition ma
Tags (Score:2)
Oh, *THAT* Spiderman. (Score:3, Funny)
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The REAL application is high-density memory. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is where the Ramathan's nanolayer bonding comes into play. Because the nanoglue forms such a strong bond and also prevents the copper and silica from mixing, the use of tantalum can be eliminated from the equation, effectively shrinking the space between the two materials from about 15 nanometres to one nanometre.
One nanometer. Current Flash memory can't go below 40 nm right now. If/when Ramathan's discovery gets applied to the industry, it'll be quite a boost for reaching smaller and more energy-efficient computers.
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Na no! (Score:3, Interesting)
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He's big, but not fat. Some cats are small, sorta nano-like, but not him. Like Spider-Man, he can jump up on cars, etc. in order to get a better view of his territory.
Looking out for Enemy cats, and for the occasional mouse. Sometimes those turn out to be rats, so you have to watch where you step as he will bring killed rats to you, expecting praise, and a few minutes alone with the refrigerator, you having opened the door for him, and are asked to look the oth
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Selling and advertising have polluted our thinking and our vocabulary. Too bad,- that for people to get exicted about this work, the scientists have to sell it as a promo tie-in to a movie.
out
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"This table was assembled thanks to advanced macrochemistry bonding devices known as 'screws'".
Art imitates life, or is it.... (Score:1)
Groan..... (Score:3, Funny)
1. Spider-Man web shooters.
2. A More Efficient beer bong.
3. Penis enlarging pills.
4. Larger breast implants.
5. Better tasting malt liquor.
6. A better, more gripping "Reality TV" show.
7. More comfortable prisons, because doing Hard Time is just -oh so- hard.
8. Protesting for the sake of protesting.
9. Spending billions of tax dollars to build a bridge to nowhere.
10. American Idol.
11. Beauty pageants.
12. Porn, porn, and more porn.
13. Making porn more readily available.
14. Viagra.
15. Rogaine.
16. Giving Illegal Immigrants a free pass into the United States.
17. Paris Hilton.
18. Trying to get you IPod "Just Right" instead of finishing your essay on the importance of education.
19. Second Life and World of Warcraft.
20. Developing a cheaper, low carb beer that tastes great and is less filling.
21. Making better videos for YouTube.
22. Devloping technology that allows you to drive faster and safer through traffic while talking on your cell phone, checking your email on your Blackberry, and catch the lastest and hottest music videos on your dash mounted LCD screen.
23. Perfecting the "Keg Stand".
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1,995,263. More efficient engines.
1,995,264. An inexpensive, efficient fusion reactor.
1,995,265. Manned exploration of the solar system.
1,995,266. College curriculums that contain field-relevent studies, rather than including irrelevent ones.
1,995,267. Colonization of the moon.
1,995,268. Colonization of suitable planets.
1,995,269. Manned exploration of space.
1,995,270. Social attitudes that create the desire to learn more, rather than to smoke pot, inhale potato chips, and play video games all day.
1,995,271. Taking technology out of video games and putting it into things that actually matter.
1,995,272. More efficient treatments for cancer.
1,995,273. A cure for AIDS.
1,995,274. Practical solutions to counter global warming.
1,995,275. Understanding the importance of farmers and agriculture to human society, rather than ignoring them as "redneck idiots".
1,995,276. Explore the secrets of the Universe.
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Wow. I gues I really have my priorities out of order.
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24. Wasting my time in overly long and overly plenty Slashdot posts instead of doing anything either from the beginning of the list, or the end of it.
Whining is easy, it has been easy for centuries, but now with the Internet, it's even easier. I'd rather take the web shooter than this, thank you very much.
Starting countdown... now (Score:2)
The purpose of every new technology, the foremost purpose, is to shut up all those people who keep pointing out how stupid the majority are.
I webbed you... (Score:3, Funny)
Ideal transportation (Score:2)
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Wait...comic book? (Score:2)
Wait...when did they make a comic book out of the Spiderman movies? I hope they didn't mess up the characters or plot too much; everyone knows that movie-to-comic-book transfers are always disastrous (except, of course, for Fantastic Four).
Man, those sentences almost hurt to type; but I guess it was all in the interest of comedy, so it was worth it.
just like cleopatra (Score:1)