Thought for the month
"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen"
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. 1870 – 1924
Wednesday, 17 April 2013
Marvel at Young’s Modulus
In
the film Spiderman 2 the comic book hero manages to stop a runaway New
York City subway train with his webbing. Calculations by physics
students at Leicester University based on the weight, speed and stopping
distance of the film’s four fully loaded R160 subway cars have been
used to derive the mechanical properties required for Peter Parker’s
webbing. They found that the Young’s modulus, or stiffness, of the web
would need to have been 3.12 gigapascals (GPa). This figure is indeed
compatible with naturally occurring spider's silk, which ranges from 1.5
GPa to 12 GPa in the orb-weaver spiders (family Araneidae). No webinar
is available but the full paper is on-line.
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