Spider Silk Cape Goes On Display 96
fangmcgee writes "Before anyone asks, no, it's not bulletproof. But that doesn't mean that the glistening yellow cape—the world's largest garment made entirely from spider silk—isn't a massive feat of engineering to be marveled. Now on public display for the first time at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the textile gets its unearthly gleam from the undyed filaments of the golden orb spider, a species of arachnid commonly found in Madagascar."
That's remarkable, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Godley spent five years collecting and harnessing over 1 million spiders in special “silking” contraptions to extract their threads, 24 critters at a time.
On average, 23,000 spiders yield roughly 1 ounce of silk, making the process intensely laborious and time-consuming.
I am amazed and impressed, but a part of me goes "wtf was the point?"
Ah, well. That's one heck of an art project.
Re:Hey... (Score:4, Interesting)
TFA does describe some of the processing of the garment, so I'd assume that it would be wearable like normal silk.
It's apparently also supposed to be very light. Is it strong too? Or is the point just to have done it because it was there? If its properties end up being worse than silk-worm silk then there isn't really much point.
Like aluminium I suspect (Score:5, Interesting)
Aluminium was once phenomenally rare and expensive. Napoleon had a set of highly valued plates made of the stuff. Breakthroughs in manufacturing made it a cheap, common material. I suspect this will go the same way, with synthetic versions becoming a utilitarian material among others. The cape will become an amusing historical footnote.
Potentially fascinating only,.. (Score:4, Interesting)
What are the capabilities of this silk? How is it superior to regular silk? I see no real facts just that it's made of spider silk and took a while? It would take me a while to fasion a life size bridge out of Lego - it doesn't mean it would be stronger than a real bridge.
?
Re:Spider silk isn't sticky (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually most spiders produce something like 5-7 different kinds of silk protein, with a separate organ for producing each. The strongest being dragline silk, which makes the structural part of the traditional bug-catching web and earns the "stronger than steel" reputation. The "glue" is actually another type of silk, which I believe is typically combined with *yet another* kind of silk to produce the actual bug-catching part of the web. Fascinating stuff, I wish I had a link to the recent TED talk on it.
As an interesting side note, spider silk gets many of it's properties from the intricate structure imbued by their sophisticated spinnerets. Even if the recent silkworm gene-tweaking experiments managed to hit 100% spider-silk protein instead of 20%, the silk would still be significantly weaker since the silkworm's "extrusion nozzle" can only create a much cruder fiber.