If physicist Kamal Singh needs material for his experiments, he heads to his garden. After all, that’s where the spiders live.
He and his colleagues have found a way to sculpt spider silk into a dazzling variety of shapes.They’ve created silk loops, twisted chains and coiled springs unlike anything a spider ever produced. They even built a Möbius strip, a twisted cylinder with only one side. Those researchers showed how to attach silk to other materials, including metal and glass. Singh hopes his team’s technique could have medical uses, like creating new bandages for wounds or burns.
Singh lives in Mohali, India. There, he works at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research. His garden is home to thousands of spiders. To gather the silk he works with, he coaxes a spider onto a stick. Then he gives that stick a quick jerk. The spider leaps away, trailing behind it a pristine line of silk. And now Singh has what he needs.
To build things out of the silk, Singh’s group uses a femtosecond laser. This is a tool that sends out powerful pulses of light that are very short. How short? Each pulse lasts only a few femtoseconds. (A femtosecond is 0.000000000000001 second. That means there are a thousand trillion of them in one second.) Spider silk can start out about 1/20th the width of the average human hair. The researchers use their laser to then tailor that silk into new shapes. That laser can make very precise cuts, remove sections of silk or attach the silk to other materials.
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The researchers described their technique in the September Nature Materials.
Sculpting silk with lasers shows “you can use light to do really amazing things with protein-based materials,” says David Kaplan. He works at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. Although he did not…
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