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Friendly neighbourhood scientists have created their own version of Spider-Man’s webs. Their silk mixture can form a solid string when shot out of a needle and even stick to and lift objects!

The scientists made the web liquid by taking silkworm cocoons and boiling them in a special mixture. Doing this breaks up the long silk fibres into smaller proteins. Then they found that adding acetone, the smelly liquid adults use to remove nail polish, caused the silk mixture to change from a liquid into a jelly.

But this process took hours and a web-slinging hero like Spider-Man needs to spin webs quickly. So, the researchers added another ingredient to the mix: dopamine. Dopamine is an important molecule in the brain, but it’s also used to make sticky things and it caused the mixture to solidify nearly instantly.

To spin a silk string, the scientists designed a web-shooter device using a special needle with two holes. This way they could push out the silk mixture from the inner needle and acetone from the outer one surrounding it. The acetone caused the silk mixture to solidify into a string and then evaporated away. The scientists were left with a silk string stuck to the object they had aimed it at.

“It’s really a superhero-inspired material,” says Marco Lo Presti from Tufts University.

Unfortunately, the web isn’t strong or sticky enough to swing between buildings or to stop a runaway train in its tracks just yet. But Marco and his team did find their web could pick up smaller objects, like a steel bolt, a scalpel partially buried in sand and a 5-gram wood block from about 12 centimetres away.