Spider Silk Can Halt a Train

Former vice president Gore spoke at Google a couple of weeks ago (promoting his new book). One of the research projects he mentioned was "spider-goats", goats that are genetically engineered to secrete spider silk along with their milk.<p>Some details in a news article here: <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/14/synthetic-biology-spider-goat-genetics" rel="nofollow">http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/14/synthetic-biol...</a><p>Given the value of the silk (and presumably the difficulty in mass-farming spiders), this seems like an attractive idea -- as long as the scientists do the math right and don't end up with spiders the size of goats or something.

The article is a bit misleading in that it states that a spiders web could stop the train. The paper is clearer in this respect. Of course it should say the fictional web in Spiderman could stop the train, if it were made of the material of the actual spiders web. They assume a thread diameter of 5mm, as opposed to probably about .1mm in a real spiders web.

<a href="http://what-if.xkcd.com/18/" rel="nofollow">http://what-if.xkcd.com/18/</a><p>So can AK-47s.

<p><pre><code> | We were surprised to find out that the webbing | was portrayed accurately. </code></pre> They are forgetting that in the movie the strands of web were not all connected together. They had Spiderman at their center, holding on to them. It would seem that his body and/or his grip on the web strands would be the weakest link in trying to resist the force of a train.

Anything can halt a train, if you put a lot of it in one place.

This is related to biomimicry (using nature as the inspiration for design). If you're interested in learning more, I helped start a local group: <a href="http://bayareabiomimicry.org/" rel="nofollow">http://bayareabiomimicry.org/</a><p>- Ryan

What about the materials and structure of a train car - can they sustain instantaneous force required to stop a speeding train? RRRIP! Oops, maybe not.