8 Science Experiments Inspired By Superheroes

8. Spider-Man - Spider Silk

Although we probably won't be seeing any scientists donning lycra and fighting crime in the near future, they have been looking into a way of producing that mightily useful spidey silk - and their methods are only slightly less weird than getting bitten by a radioactive spider.

Spider silk is actually incredibly useful. It's strength to weight ratio in real life is actually not that far off what we see in Spider-Man's universe, which makes it ideal for all kinds of applications. The only problem is that milking spiders is probably one of the more tedious and time consuming jobs in agriculture. So

Researchers at the University of Wyoming decided, therefore, that it would be much easier to simple splice spider genes into goats and collect the silk from their milk (maybe the Mad Scientists Awards were coming up or something).

This way, it is possible to harvest large amounts of milk silk, plus, there's a lot less screaming involved when you cut the spiders out of the equation.