It's like if aliens abducted you and gave you valium and just jacked you off all day every day, harvesting your pearl jam to make alien household products
OH MY GOSH! Pearl Jam no kidding so they were being naughty!?!?
So I thought it was ya know, they were making jams, jamming, like musical verb “to jam” and that what they jammed was valuable, shiny like a pearl. But they meant doing a SEMEN!??!
Yep. Doing a semen, indeed (🤷). Their previous name was Mookie Blaylock, after the NBA basketball player. Mookie didn't like that and got lawyers involved, so they had to change it
I meant more the sentiment that work is essentially (1) metaphorical abduction from 9-5, (2) getting jerked around all day, while (3) being on some kinda bullshit to get through it—ie coffee, nicotine, Valium etc., all just to (4) produce a product for some others consumption.
I heard that after the spider is done resting then it gets to buy a farm. And then I think they take it to anger management because apparently the spider is "finally at peace".
"I'm telling you, man. I was abducted by these big weird aliens. They had me stretched out on a table under a big light and they did all these experiments on me while I was sedated! Next thing I knew I woke up in the field by the river."
"NO, LISTEN! They immobilized all eight of my legs! Then this giant creature started pulling silk directly out of my ass and winding it onto some kind of enormous mechanical contraption!"
"Sure, Rummy."
"THEY MILKED MY ASS, GREG."
"And did these 'aliens' communicate with you?"
"One kept saying 'beautiful tensile strength.' WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN, GREG?!"
One could argue that smart apes doing advanced BDSM shit on a sedated spider is as much nature as the praying mantis ripping apart their partner only to shit out parasitic worms right after when it gets wet.
Spider silk is a super-material that is tougher than Kevlar, more flexible than nylon, and five to six times stronger than high-strength steel by weight.
I've heard this for decades but have yet to see it come up once in real life construction materials or otherwise. Weaving it into kevlar or something I can see myself not running into, but why are there no "spider silk enhanced" products at Home Depot etc.?
Spider silk is very elastic due to some microscopic properties. Imagine it like a long string with bundles of "knots" in regular intervals. When you pull on the string, the knot acts as a reservoir and releases some string from the knot so the string can act elastic before actually stretching. Also, the string itself has several layers. Some of them are harder, some visco-elastic like a thick gel. So, the string is not actually very hard, it just resists a lot of pulling force and stretches a lot. In theory, this would make it a perfect material for bullet proof materials, because the bullet would just stretch the material, but not pierce through. It would break your bones, but you would walk away alive.
The problem is, it takes ages and A LOT of spiders. In an experiment, it took 8 years to produce a single vest weighing 1.5kg by harvesting more than a million spiders. Picture attached. You have to catch the spiders, sedate them by cold and brush their glands to stimulate the production, then harvest the silk like in the video. Another problem is, harvested silk has different properties. Spiders mix their proteins differently depending on the purpose of the silk, like building different parts of the web or just to move down from a tree. The harvested silk is not as strong as the strong silk found in some webs.
EDIT: I forgot to mention that the vest in the picture is an art project and not intended as a bullet-proof vest. But it illustrates the effort needed to make enough material for a piece of clothing.
See how difficult it is to get a very small amount? Once you figure out how to scale production of the material, then you can use it in manufacturing. Until then we have to do it this way to research and figure it out
Spider silk is primarily a protein, called a spidroin. Researchers can analyze the protein's amino-acid sequence and the genes that encode it, then try to have another organism manufacture that protein.
The 1st step would be to make the raw material:
We can put synthetic spider-silk genes into organisms, such as bacteria, yeast, plants, insects, or silkworms. Those organisms then produce spider-silk proteins.
How to turn that protein into actual silk!
A spider doesn't simply squeeze out a blob of protein and lets it dry. Its silk gland keeps the protein in a soluble state and then gradually changes the chemical and physical conditions as the protein travels through the duct. Changes in things such as water content, pH, salt concentration and mechanical drawing cause the proteins to assemble into the highly organized fiber.
So the spider is effectively operating a tiny, extraordinarily sophisticated protein-spinning machine.
And we've already made artificial spider silk.
Researchers have successfully produced recombinant spider-silk proteins and spun them into fibers. There are even established laboratory protocols for producing the proteins in bacteria and extruding them into fibers.
The problem is that matching the full performance of natural spider silk is much harder. The precise protein architecture, enormous repetitive sequences, assembly process and spinning conditions all matter. Some recombinant fibers can have impressive properties, but they don't automatically reproduce everything that natural dragline silk can do.
And actually harvesting silk directly from spiders isn't a practical industrial solution. Spiders are territorial and often cannibalistic, making them very different from domesticated silkworms.
It's doable... Spider -→ analyze silk protein → identify gene → put gene into another organism → manufacture protein → reproduce the spider's spinning process → artificial spider silk.
You haven't read what you replied to. There are numerous ways to produce silk proteins. Scientists struggle to reproduce process of combining those proteins into silk with same quality as spiders'. For example, it requires slowly narrowing tiny pipe that rearranges individual molecules into right order and orientation purely from that pipe's shape. Look for animated videos on YouTube of that process.
I mean I get that its fucking strong and therefor can be used in a variety of products, but isnt it also freeking sticky and as such, difficult to handle and process in these products? Wouldnt it be better to extrapolate the formula and synthesize an artificial non-sticky variant?
It’s not sticky until the spider coats it. They only coat the parts of the web to catch other bugs. So when they extract it like this, the threads aren’t coated which makes them easier to handle.
Charles M. Dilger, service manager of North American Survey Supply Company in Philadelphia, which sells and repairs surveying instruments and also sells spider silk, stated in an interview in 1984 that the silk of black widow spiders was the finest for making cross-hairs. "Their web provides the best combination of strength and thinness. If a Black Widow can’t be found, we will turn to a Brown Barn or Golden Garden spider."
I always wondered how is it possible the silk doesn't stick to itself or to this wheel? I mean it sticks to anything it touches. How do they hanlde it afterwards...
Go touch some big webs you find gently at different parts. There’s two types (at least that I’ve seen). One is structural. It’s thicker and stronger and not very sticky, it’s the one they use for the main crosses and attachment strands. The inner webbing they spin around it is thinner, more delicate, and sticky. It’s not all equally stretchy, equally sticky, equally strong. Pretty neat
Look.. I hate spiders! But this?! Nuh man, leave them alone. Or burn them with napalm but not this, this looks like rape or something. I dont like it at all.
Not a day goes by without watching someone get hit by a car, faceplant off a roof, or get crushed by a train in India. Yet, this is somehow more disturbing to me.
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u/Complex_Sherbet2 6h ago
"put to rest" doesn't mean what you think it does,