By Anupum Pant
Despite how far we’ve come in our endeavors, what a little spider can achieve has never been achieved by humans. A spider is capable of turning the proteins poured out in liquid form, from its own body, into a solid silk which is the world’s strongest material for its weight. Yes, stronger than a steel wire of the same thickness. That’s not all. These fibers are also incredibly elastic. That is to say they can stretch to great amounts and come back to the same length without losing the elasticity.
The spider webs are also unbelievably the perfect things to form your gauze pad out of. They have a remarkable healing property.
If you are in midst of a forest, and get cut by a machete and there’s profuse bleeding, what do you do? You find a cobweb. Funny as it may sound, putting a bunch of cobweb on your wound will make the blood coagulate much faster. Thanks to those thousands of strands of nanowires which act as nucleation lines.
Besides that, since the cobwebs are proteins basically, they are good places for fungi and bacteria to grow. So, the spider knows that and has evolved to keep these bacterial and fungi growths away from its web. Cobwebs are in fact antiseptic and antifungal too. As long as the web is clean, it will not cause any kind of infection if you put it on an open wound.
This was a popular method to tend to open wounds among Ancient Greeks and Roman in the battleground.
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I’ve always been fascinated by spider webs, but never realized they had so many practical uses. I’m surprised we don’t have spider farms by now where we harvest their webs… or do we?