{"id":665,"date":"2007-07-02T12:57:10","date_gmt":"2007-07-02T17:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=665"},"modified":"2007-07-04T13:10:53","modified_gmt":"2007-07-04T18:10:53","slug":"spider-silk-goats-and-the-space-elevator-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/?p=665","title":{"rendered":"Spider silk, goats, and the Space Elevator Games"},"content":{"rendered":"

As ScienCentralNews reports<\/a>, spider silk is strong stuff, “5 times tougher than Kevlar.”<\/em>\u00a0 But as they also report in this very interesting article, it’s hard to obtain, in quantity,\u00a0from spiders.\u00a0 The story describes a technique of harvesting spider silk from Goat milk.\u00a0 The idea was to insert gene fragments into goats and then harvest the silk spider from the goat’s milk.<\/p>\n

One of the entrants in the 2006 Space Elevator Games<\/a> Tether Pull competition was a Canadian\u00a0company called Nexia Biotechnologies<\/a>.\u00a0 They licensed this technology and attempted to create a super-strong tether to enter into the Games.\u00a0 They never showed up to compete, however,\u00a0and I always wondered why.\u00a0 This article\u00a0gives us the probable reason; the spider silk created from this technique was inferior to the real stuff.<\/p>\n

A newer technique, using the entire gene sequence of spider silk (instead of just a fraction of it, as was done before)\u00a0may be in the offing, and this time, instead of splicing this information into goats, it may be spliced\u00a0into crops.\u00a0\u00a0Cheryl Hayashi, one of the team members who has helped decode the entire spider silk gene sequence\u00a0states; “That way they could be grown very cheaply, you know, by the acre. And then the silk protein would be extracted from the plant material and this would be the way that we could get very large amounts of spider silks. We could get spider silks by the ton.”<\/em><\/p>\n

There is also a video<\/a>\u00a0about spider silk and\u00a0spider silk “farming”\u00a0you can view.\u00a0 One learns that Black Widow spiders\u00a0happen to be\u00a0the best for this use.\u00a0\u00a0Nadia Ayoub, the researcher interviewed,\u00a0said that farming Black Widows to extract Spider silk was like “farming wolves for meat”<\/em> – a very interesting comparison.<\/p>\n

It’s a shame that spider silk is not strong enough for an earth-based space elevator, but it should work just fine for a lunar-based one.\u00a0 Here’s hoping this technique becomes practical.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As ScienCentralNews reports, spider silk is strong stuff, “5 times tougher than Kevlar.”\u00a0 But as they also report in this very interesting article, it’s hard to obtain, in quantity,\u00a0from spiders.\u00a0 The story describes a technique of harvesting spider silk from Goat milk.\u00a0 The idea was to insert gene fragments into goats and then harvest the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-announcements","category-spaceelevatorcompetitions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.spaceelevatorblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}