Scientists prove superhero power
SPIDER-Man’s webbing really could stop a train if it recreated what exists in nature, research has shown.
In the film Spider-Man 2, t he superhero shoots strands of the material at surrounding buildings to prevent a runaway train plummeting to disaster.
The scene seems farfetched even by Hollywood standards, but not according to a group of young British scientists investigating the amazing properties of spider’s silk.
They calculated that, scaled up to Spider-Man proportions, it would be strong enough to halt a four-car New York subway train travelling at full speed.
The three University of Leicester physics students worked out the force needed to overcome the train’s momentum, an enormous 300,000 Newtons. To avoid breaking, every cubic metre of Spider-Man’s web would have to soak up almost 500 million joules of energy.
Incredibly, one spider spins silk that is up to the job. Darwin’s bark spider, from Madagascar, creates orb-shaped webs more than 10 times stronger than Kevlar.
One of the young scientists, Alex Stone, 21, from Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, said: “It is often quoted that spider webs are stronger than steel, so we thought it would be interesting to see whether this held true for Spider-Man’s scaled up version.”
The research is published in the latest issue of the University’s Journal of Physics Special Topics.