We’re beginning to see the gadgets we fantasized about as children come to life. Penny Brown’s video watch from Inspector Gadget? Check. The Starfleet tricorder from Star Trek? Almost there. But web-shooting and web-slinging? That wasn’t something we really expected to manifest in reality. And it certainly wasn’t part of the agenda for the scientist who has actualized the strong, sticky, air-spun web—Marco Lo Presti from Tufts University’s Silklab.
Back in 2020, Lo Presti, a research assistant professor in biomedical engineering, was tackling the problem of underwater adhesives. The initial material he chose consisted of silk and dopamine, a popular blend that imitates the way mussels cling firmly to rocky surfaces underwater—beneficial for various high-tech applications.
“While cleaning the glassware used for this silk and dopamine solution with acetone,” he explains, “I noticed it was transitioning into a solid-state, resembling a web-like material, morphing into something that appeared fibrous. I shared the vials with Fio, and we instantly began considering how we could develop a remote adhesive [a substance that adheres to an object from afar] from it.”
Fio is Fiorenzo Omenetto, the engineering professor at Tufts and the creative force behind Silklab. “We like to say that every experiment is meticulously planned with equations and careful consideration, but it’s really about making connections,” he notes. “You explore and play, connecting the dots in unexpected ways. Part of the underestimated play is when you stop and think, ‘Hey, isn’t this reminiscent of Spider-Man?’ Initially, you might dismiss it, but creating a material that emulates superpowers is undeniably intriguing.”
Before Lo Presti could pivot to these unintentional webs, he needed to finalize his research on underwater adhesives using biomolecules, which he accomplished in 2021. Much of what the Silklab develops is “bio-inspired,” taking cues from spiders and silkworms, mussels and barnacles, the slime of velvet worms, even tropical orchids—implying that exploring the potential of this sticky web could seem like a seamless progression for the team.
However, Lo Presti emphasizes that while the new material does resemble spider silk, “there isn’t a spider capable of ejecting a stream of solution that solidifies into a fiber and can capture distant objects remotely.” This feat is truly novel in the realm of reality.
Yet, as highlighted in the research paper published in *Advanced Functional Materials*—enter the realm of fiction. In the original 1960s comic books by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, starting with Amazing Fantasy #15, Peter Parker invents a “tiny device,” secured to both wrists and activated by finger pressure, to generate strands of ejectable ‘spider webs’. By the time of the mid-2000s Sam Raimi Spider-Man films, the web-shooting shifted from a wrist-mounted spinneret gadget to an organic feature tied to his superhero metamorphosis.
