Science

Spider-Man would be so envious. Spiders have woven webs infused with carbon nanotubes and even graphene, raising the prospect of new materials with record-beating properties.

Graphene – sheets of carbon just one atom thick – is one of the strongest artificial materials, and spider silk is one of the strongest natural ones. So Nicola Pugno of the University of Trento, Italy, wondered what would happen if you combined them.

Pugno and his colleagues captured five spiders from the Pholcidae family and sprayed them with a mixture of water and graphene particles 200 to 300 nanometres wide. They also sprayed another 10 spiders with carbon nanotubes and water to compare the effects of the two materials.

Some spiders produced below-par silk, but others got a major boost. The best fibres came from a spider dosed with nanotubes: it was around 3.5 times as tough and strong as the best unaltered silk, spun by the giant riverine orb spider.

From spiders to silkworms

The only natural material that is stronger than orb spider silk is the material that the teeth of molluscs called limpets are made out of, Pugno and colleagues revealed earlier this year. The molluscs’ teeth stretch more than the spider silk, but are much less tough, meaning they crack more easily.

The team isn’t sure how the graphene and carbon nanotubes end up in the silk. One possibility is that the carbon coats the outside of the strands, but Pugno thinks that would not be enough to account for the increase in strength. Instead, he believes the spiders mop up materials in their environment and incorporate them into the silk as they spin. This comes at a cost, however – four of the spiders died soon after being sprayed.

At this early stage it’s not clear how such a material will be used, but one possibility is a giant net capable of catching falling aircraft, suggests Pugno. The team also plans to investigate other ways of producing bionic materials, such as dosing silkworms with artificial substances. “This concept could become a way to obtain materials with superior characteristics,” he says.

References: New Scientist

Digital tools haven’t transformed politics as much as we expected. But that’s about to change – and just in time

POLITICS is broken. Across the globe, voter turnout has been in decline for decades. The electorate believes that “the parties are all the same, the politicians are all the same, they are not like us, it does not make any difference”, according to Ruth Fox, director of the Hansard Society, which records British political discourse.

Low turnout breeds further discontent. It is impossible to construct an electoral system that is perfectly fair (1 May 2010, p 28), but low turnout exacerbates the sense of unfairness when a minority government is elected, or when tiny factions end up tipping the balance of power.

Technocrats have long hoped that social media might empower the public – helping them to make their voices heard. But what has transpired has been not so much a transformation of politics as more of the same. Sloganeering, hucksterism and gaffes persist: the abiding impression is often of ever bigger megaphones blaring in an ever bigger echo chamber.

We should spare a thought for the politicians, too. Consider this: they are now open all hours to their constituents’ every whim and whinge, their every utterance recorded and pored over by their opponents. Is it any wonder they struggle to engage?

So what is to be done? It is not that people have lost interest in issues such as health, education, welfare or homes. “Even the most disengaged… including people who had never voted, could not be described as not caring,” reported the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy in January. But they no longer feel connected to politics as they once did, as card-carrying members of a party or trade union, for example.

We have the beginnings of a solution. Online campaigns are easy to join, and can thus quickly attract huge support – but are all too easily ignored. So hacktivist groups are now building tools that buttress their efforts with real ballot-box power, helping people deploy their votes effectively and liberating policymaking from the wonks and lobbyists (see “Better than a ballot box: Could digital democracy win your vote?”).

These tools are gaining ground, both in austerity-stricken states where conventional politics has fallen furthest from grace, and in progressive democracies. In some, such as Spain, their adoption may have been helped by memories of more dictatorial forms of rule.

The new systems are distinctly rough and ready. Some require us to reconsider such sacred cows as the secret ballot; they may prove vulnerable to manipulation and mob rule. But dismissing them because they don’t yet have all the answers would be a mistake, just as it was a mistake to sneer at the call from comedian Russell Brand to opt out of the current system. Brand clearly struck a chord with the young and discontented, even if he proposed no real alternative.

Better to harness that energy to find that alternative. There is a precedent. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, many economics students protested against courses dominated by unrealistic models. A radically revamped curriculum is now being tried out at institutions around the world. Pillars of the Establishment, notably the Bank of England, are rethinking economics too (28 March 2015, p 28).

We don’t want to wait for a crisis of democracy to prompt a rethink of politics. Nor should we wait for politicians to act: that would be like turkeys voting for Christmas. If the task is to return power to the people, it has to start with the people too. Ever fewer of us may want to engage with the current political system. But we should all engage with the task of fixing it.

References:

www.new scientist.com