"Can he swing from a thread?" A bit of Spidey Science

I have always loved the interesting abilities of Spider-man so staying in theme with Amazing April i have decided to post the science behind my favorite aspects of Spidey, first the web slinging! Now to clarify unlike in the current Spider-man movies in the comics(at least the original and Amazing Spider-man comics) Spider-man's webs don't come from his body but from 2 web shooters filled with a fluid he designed, however we don't know Peter Parker's formula for his webbing so we will be analyzing the organic webbing. So lets dive in!

Now from the research i have gone through the type of webbing Spider-man uses is a spiders drag line silk which is much stronger than steel yet extremely flexible. This is due to the fact that this silk has a series of crystal as well as spring-like structures in its proteins. Now a strand of spider silk only about a tenth as thick as a human hair can stop insects flying at it at 15mph without breakage. Now if a strand that thin can stop that much then a thread that is half a millimeter would be able to adequately support a full grown man, a few more millimeters allows for Peter to swing some friends along with him. Scientific research also claims that if they could bring spider silk up to an inch in diameter it could stop a fighter jets momentum. Cool right?

Now you may say "Yes Adam that is cool but we could never make spider webs right?" Wrong! All we need is fibroid to make spider silk and already geneticists have created genetically modified goats that can produce fibroid protein molecules in their milk glands. However the fibroid protein molecules must still be separated from the milk and then spun. So therefore if can produce these proteins then all we need to do is grow spinnerets to spin them! Okay... so maybe it still is kinda impossible but with gene splicing these days who knows how long before its within our grasp.

Another amazing ability of his I always wished I had was the wall crawling and that's more possible now then ever. This one isn't genetically driven but is still incredible!
Engineers at Cornell University have created a device the size of your palm that uses the power of water to adhere to wood, glass and brick. Paul Steen a bio molecular engineer discovered that pumping tiny droplets of water through microscopic holes in a flat plate manipulated the surface tension of water allowing it to stick to other objects. Using an electrical field to pump the water through the holes, he was also able to reverse the process, allowing the plate to become unstuck on demand simply by changing the electric field. An early version of the device can hold weights of around one ounce using water droplets about a sixth the size of a pinhead! That's small!
The project is currently being funded by the military and is proving very successful.

Well that concludes our look at the science of Spider-man, i hope you all enjoyed and now i hope you'll pay attention to the walls and sides of buildings cause with this tech you never know who may be "hanging around".

Sources: History Channel's:Spider-man tech, and Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7280275/Device-could-create-real-life-Spiderman.html