Human skin embedded with spider silk can stop a bullet

Human skin embedded with spider silk can stop a bullet

www.rawstory.com

VIDEO: Dutch artist Jalila Essaïdi and cell biologist Abdoelwaheb El Ghalbzouri have blended spider silk with human skin to produce material that is three times stronger than kevlar.

See video here:
www.rawstory.com...

(visit the link for the full news article)



Related AboveTopSecret.com Discussion Threads:
Nano-suit military technology - Awesome.

Wow, what a fascinating story!

So imagine all the implications of this.

How long before the military seizes the project and claims it for its own nefarious purposes?

They'll make a law that only law enforcement and military are allowed the "superskin"!

How much will it go for on the black market?

What happens when the drug cartels get wind of this and can't be killed anymore?

But I digress....Or do I?

www.rawstory.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Yes, this is scary. That's all we need unstoppable people.

And just where do we get enough spider silk to do the job? Goats, of course!!

Normally, getting enough spider silk for these applications requires large numbers of spiders. However, spiders tend to be territorial, so when the researchers tried to set up spider farms, the spiders killed each other. To solve this problem, Randy Lewis, a professor of molecular biology at the University of Wyoming, and other researchers decided to put the spiders’ dragline silk gene into goats in such a way that the goats would only make the protein in their milk. Like any other genetic factor, only a certain percentage of the goats end up with the gene. For instance, of seven goat kids born in February 2010, three have tested positive for having the silk protein gene. When these transgenic goats have kids and start lactating, the researchers will collect the milk and purify the spider silk protein into “much, much higher quantities,” Lewis said. Other than their ability to produce the spider silk protein, the goats do not seem to have any other differences in health, appearance, or behavior compared to goats without the gene, the researchers said.

Source

The medical implications for this are amazing ,bionic humans are getting closer and closer to reality now.

Here the video.

Originally posted by TrueAmerican


Wow, what a fascinating story!

So imagine all the implications of this.

How long before the military seizes the project and claims it for its own nefarious purposes?

They'll make a law that only law enforcement and military are allowed the "superskin"!

How much will it go for on the black market?

What happens when the drug cartels get wind of this and can't be killed anymore?

But I digress....Or do I?

www.rawstory.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

How long before they start to blend human and spiders DNA for engineering a hybrid mutant?? I'm not kidding. If such research become militarized, what will prevent TPTB of engineering human gene to make subjects capable to segregate spider silk through their own glands or something like that??? Nothing good can come from it.

Double post.

If you took biology you would of known that.

And they just now figured this out.

reply to post by occrest




Even SpiderMan would be jealous!

That's nuts! So soon humans will be producing their own spider silk in their own bodies! And shooting them out at walls, and people, and hanging in the streets, and... Spider webbing up all the mean bad people in the world? Ha, we could hang them in spider webs from bridges!

The interesting thing is that there are stronger polymers in nature. I, for one, look forward to genetic engineering programs capable of implementing such modifications to the human body - a weave of strong polymers would go quite a way to improve our durability.

Of course - it won't make people "immune" to gunfire. The real problem with bullets is the amount of deformation and impact done to the body. Sure - when they penetrate the skin at supersonic velocities, they create large air bubbles that rend flesh at the cellular level - but there is still considerable bruising that takes place when absorbing the energy from a bullet that has been prevented from penetrating the skin.

This is why, to stop heavier caliber weapons, ceramic plates are used. The ceramic plates are near-crystalline in structure and absorb massive amounts of energy when shattered, directing it away from the trajectory of the slug. While a simple addition of a few layers of Kevlar weave could stop those heavier rounds; the body behind them would be dealt lethal damage.

I would imagine an effective "super soldier" genetic engineering program would utilize a number of crystalline fibers woven to the bone structure and supporting a polymer weave within the skin. This would prevent penetration and absorb the force to reduce the shock to the underlying tissues (although exactly how practical such a concept would be is questionable). Coupled with other advances in cellular structures and tissue formation - virtual immunity to smaller caliber weapons (to include a number of sub-machine-guns) should be attainable.

More importantly, it would compound the effectiveness of lighter, more mobile armors that would allow many body segments to be given virtual immunity to the 5.56 and 7.62 classes of weapons without compromising much in the way of mobility.

Of course, I've been designing my own genetic-engineered "super soldier" for novelization purposes for about the past ten years, so the concept is rather familiar to me. I'd better write the damned thing before it turns into a work of historical fiction.

reply to post by TrueAmerican

it wont make people invincible a rifle round would be able to penetrate this stuff

is been known for centuries that silk can help slow down bullets/arrows and why soldiers wore silk undershirts as it could reduce a lethal wound and also the fibres helped keep the wounds a bit cleaner reducing the chance of infection

Wow, cool. I just got a u2u from an alert ATS member, jazz10, who saw this story and wanted me to see this ATS thread:

Ship turned away after spiders started 'pouring' from cargo hold

From the original story here:
www.telegraph.co.uk...

Excerpt:

Customs officials discovered the infestation in the MV Altavia’s cargo after the South Korean ship docked in Guam, one of the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific Ocean.

Thousands of spiders, some with bodies as big as 10 pence pieces, started pouring out of the ship’s crates as Guam's Port Authority workers began moving the containers off the boat onto the dock, last Wednesday.

One crate made it onto the dock before the problem was realised.

The shipment had been destined for a US military base construction site on the island for 8,000 US Marines.

Umm, read that last sentence again!

reply to post by TrueAmerican


Stories like this make me realize how amazing the time we live in actually is. The way that our sciences are advancing in every facet gives me hope for the future.

And here is another related story, about the use of a spider-worm hybrid to produce the silk. They want this stuff...BAD!

Scientists in Indiana have announced success in producing a genetically modified abomination-style combo creature which is part spider and part silkworm. They believe that their creation will be handy for the production of next-generation bulletproof vests, among other things.

The cunning thing about the new arachno-worms is that they can produce spider silk, one of the strongest fibres known to science, while not actually being spiders. It is mainly the difficulty of farming spiders for their silk that has prevented the super-stuff from being widely used*.

"The generation of silk fibers having the properties of spider silks has been one of the important goals in materials science," says Malcolm Fraser Jr, biology prof at Notre Dame uni.

For the spidey-worm project, Fraser teamed up with Randy Lewis of the University of Wyoming, who is described as "one of the world's foremost authorities on spider silk".

Full story here:
www.theregister.co.uk...

Awesome, so now I can be my own Jack Harkness and stop a bullet.

better question..........if they infuse you with it...........

what do they do to you after youre retired?

You cant take your skin back............

Skin stops bullets, but doesn't stop kinetic energy. Head shots, and most body shots would still prove fatal even without penetration. The concussive force will end the fight. Drug lords, police, soldiers, it doesn't matter, nothing changes. Though it would be useful against shrapnel.

Cool never the less.

Seems a bit pointless infusing spider silk with human skin on a living person, not to mention painful. Then i guess there is always the chance of your body rejecting it (obviously it would be tested on a smaller scale first, but to have a complete skin graft would cause a whole load of issues). Surely it would be better used as actual body armour that you can put on, and at least then it would be more effective protection.
Nice idea, but just looking at the video, if the skin had been pulled tight, that bullet would have gone straight through it

reply to post by battl3star


i to agree with this never mind a bullet to the eye/mouth

and what happens when it mutates we get 6ft spiders

now we are the food