These are not your friendly neighborhood spiders: scientists have mixed a graphene solution that when fed to spiders allows them to spin super-strong webbing. How strong? Strong enough to carry the weight of a person. And these spiders might soon be enlisted to help manufacture enhanced ropes and cables, possibly even parachutes for skydivers, reports The Sydney Morning Herald.
Graphene is a wonder-material that is an atomic-scale hexagonal lattice made of carbon atoms. It’s incredibly strong, but it was definitely a shot in the dark to see what would happen if it was fed to spiders.
For the study, Nicola Pugno and team at the University of Trento in Italy added graphene and carbon nanotubes to a spider’s drinking water. The materials were naturally incorporated into the spider’s silk, producing webbing that is five times stronger than normal. That puts it on par with pure carbon fibers in strength, as well as with Kevlar, the material bulletproof vests are made from.
https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/stories/spider-spins-web-can-hold-weight-human-after-drinking-graphene