Ye Olde Blogge Poste, Tuesday, November 18, 2003

No Mery Lame

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled. There seem to have been two posts this particular Tuesday:

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Now this I REALLY hate!

Scientific American, take a walk of shame for this piece of crap reportage - fancy going through an entire article whose entire raison d'etre is to let us know that scientists now know the temperature of formation of DNA - AND THEN DON'T FUCKING REPORT WHAT THOSE TEMPERATURES ACTUALLY ARE!

Do yourselves a favour SciAm, and fire *name withheld* who 'reported' (if that term can be applied to such a lightweight piece of crap) this item...

Spinnerets

Hmmm. Just saw this on Science Daily - Discovery Could Lead To New Ways To Create Nano-fibers And Wires - and now I'm thinking:

Do spiders spin their silk like this? Multiple strands of ultrathin strands solidified together? Go read the article then come back.

Okay? They form a droplet inside a viscous liquid and then solidify it using light, then snap it off. A bit like:

=- --------------------------------------------------------------- --<)

^Nozzle, breaks off here, then a loooong thin thread, then a break and the droplet ^. Scuse the bad artwork...

Now suppose that spiders generate a lot of such threads inside their mysterious spinnerets. Suppose that instead of using light to solidify their threads, the 'viscous liquid' turns out to have the exact right properties to solidify the thin threads, provided they are extruded at the right speed. 

Getting a picture? If you did this continuously, you'd end up with microfilaments with 'bumps' every so often along their length, which would be the droplets. If the spinnerets jets work together, you could produce a fibre which is 'locked' together by those bumps, which consists of many microfibres, and if the viscous fluid is also adhesive, it sticks the strands together with surface tension.

I'll collect my prize when they discover that this is precisely how spiders do it. I'm confident.

These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

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