Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Superhero powers for the humble spider



iol scitech feb 26 Spider-Man

AP


The findings were used by University of Leicester researchers to show that Spider-Man’s powers are at least grounded in reality.



London – A spider’s web could stop a moving train, physicists say – if it was big enough.


The findings were used by University of Leicester researchers to show that Spider-Man’s powers are at least grounded in reality.


In one scene in the Spider-Man 2 movie, the superhero uses his web to bring a runaway subway train to a halt.


So they calculated the force needed to stop the train and how strong a web would need to be to exert that force. They found that the stiffness of Spider-Man’s web would have been 3.12 gigapascals.


Spider’s silk ranges from 1.5 gigapascals to 12 gigapascals, suggesting that the superhero’s webbing is a proportional equivalent of that of a real spider.


Their paper, Doing whatever a spider can, was published in the latest volume of the University of Leicester’s Journal of Physics Special Topics. – Daily Mail


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