A unique golden textile
A two-man project to use spider silk is achieved after 4 years
1
.
Drop or Select
A rare textile made from the silk of more than a million wild spiders has gone on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. To produce the golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 24 meters of thread from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today.
2
.
Drop or Select
Spider silk is very elastic and strong compared with steel or Kevlar, said textile expert Simon Peers, who led the project. Kevlar is a lightweight synthetic fabric which is often compared to nylon. It is very tough and durable and used in bullet-proof vests. Spider silk is resistant to wear, tear, and heat and has absolutely no melting point. But the tensile strength of spider silk is even greater than Kevlar’s and maintains elasticity, a strand of high-grade steel. Most importantly, spider silk is extremely lightweight: a strand of spider silk long enough to circle the Earth would weigh less than 500 grams (18 oz). It is also especially ductile, able to stretch up to 140 percent of its length without breaking, and can hold its strength below -40°C. This gives it a very high toughness, which equals that of commercial fibers.
3
.
Drop or Select
Researchers have long been intrigued by the unique properties of spider silk. Unfortunately, spider silk is extremely hard to mass produce. Unlike silkworms, which are easy to raise in captivity, spiders have a habit of chomping off each other’s heads when housed together. According to Peers, there’s scientific research going on all over the world right now trying to replicate the tensile properties of spider silk to apply it to all sorts of areas in medicine and industries, but no one has yet succeeded in replicating 100 percent of the properties of natural spider silk.
4
.
Drop or Select
Peers came up with the idea of weaving spider silk after learning about the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1890s and 1900s. Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them. The spiders were temporarily restrained, their silk extracted, and then let go. Peers managed to build a replica of this 24-spider silk-spinning machine. It was used at the turn of the century, said Nicholas Godley, who co-led the project with Peers. As an experiment, the pair collected and restrained about 80 spiders. When we stuck them in the machine and started turning it, a lot of them started to spin beautiful gold-colored silk straight onto our machine, Godley said.
5
.
Drop or Select
But to make even the tiniest significant size, the silk experts had to drastically scale their plan. Fourteen thousand spiders yield about an ounce of silk, Godley said, and the textile weighs about 2.8 pounds. The numbers are overwhelming. To achieve their goal, Godley and Peers began hiring dozens of spider handlers to collect wild arachnids and carefully harness them to the silk extractors. When they needed people who were willing to work with spiders, Godley said, because by the end of the project, the team had spent more than 1 million spider lifetimes. In return, they produced a beautiful yet absolutely impractical cloth, passion provided by love and obsession. Once the spiders had been silked, they were released back into the wild, said Godley. Godley said it takes them about a week to regenerate their silk. We can go back and get more from the same spiders, he said. It’s like the gift that never stops giving.
6
.
Drop or Select
Of course, spending four years to produce a single textile of spider silk isn’t very practical for scientists trying to study the properties of spider silk, or companies that want to manufacture the fabric for use as a biomedical product, or an alternative to Kevlar armor. Several groups have tried inserting spider genes into bacteria or even cows and goats to produce silk, but so far, the attempts have been only moderately successful. Part of the reason it’s so hard to generate spider silk in the lab is that it starts out as a liquid protein that’s produced by a special gland in the spider’s abdomen. Using their spinneret, spiders apply force to rearrange the protein’s molecular structure and transform it into solid silk. When we talk about a spider spinning silk, we’re talking about how the spider applies force to produce a transformation from liquid to solid, said spider silk expert Todd Blackledge of the University of Akron, Ohio, US, who was not involved in creating the textile. Scientists simply can’t replicate the efficiency with which a spider produces silk. Every year we’re getting closer and closer to being able to mass-produce it, but we’re not there yet. For now, it seems we’ll have to be content with one incredibly beautiful cloth, graciously provided by more than a million spiders.
Kéo chỉnh
Question 1 - 6
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
List of heading
Experimenting with an old idea
Life cycle of Madagascar spiders
Advances in the textile industry
Resources needed to meet the project’s demands
The physical properties of spider silk
A scientific analysis of spider silk
A unique work of art
Importance of the silk textile market
Difficulties of raising spiders in captivity