It may not look like a bunch of cobwebs but the tie you see above was spun from the same material spiders spin out from their behind. The difference is this..
It may not look like a bunch of cobwebs but the tie you see above was spun from the same material spiders spin out from their behind. The difference is this thread was mass produced from fermented microbial poop instead and it’s the first product out from materials science startup Bolt Threads.
Intrigued? We first wrote about Bolt’s zany ambitions to build a spider silk factory using microbugs when it was just getting started two years ago. The startup has since raised a total of $90 million from a slew of well-known Silicon Valley VC’s and tells TechCrunch it has bold ambitions to someday clothe us from head to toe in various materials fermented first in the lab.
Spider silk is a good start. It’s one of the toughest yet softest materials in the world but really hard to get more than a handful of before the spiders start to eat each other. Though plenty of others have tried to go there.
A Madagascar spider farm was able to get the little critters to produce about 80 feet of silk back in 2009 — the largest amount of cloth humans have ever been able to extract from the creatures naturally before the spider slaves turned to cannibalism.
