Spider Silk

Spider silk as a construction material is one of the holy grails of living in the future. Ever since I was a kid, I remember reading about people trying to figure out how to do it. We couldn’t replicate it in a lab, we couldn’t get a bigger animal to produce it, we couldn’t harvest it easily from spiders – there was always enough problems that it wasn’t a year or two away but the problems all seemed solvable, so it must just be a decade away, right? TED 2010 is going on at the moment and one of the speakers Cheryl Hayashi spoke to Wired about the virtues of spider silk:

Other materials might be very strong, but … tend to be very stiff. Spider silks turn out to be very strong but … they have a fair amount of stretch to them. Spider silk also is biodegradable. Many orb-web spinning spiders actually recycle their silk. They eat it. So silk could make for a very green product. Spider silk is also spun under benign ambient room-temperature conditions. That’s really different from something like nylon, which is a petroleum-based product that’s produced under high temperature, high-pressure conditions. Also, Kevlar has great attributes but it’s essentially inert — so if you want to dispose of it you pretty much have to incinerate it.

Cool stuff. I can’t wait for the TED videos to start going online.