Some details in a news article here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/14/synthetic-biol...
Given the value of the silk (and presumably the difficulty in mass-farming spiders), this seems like an attractive idea -- as long as the scientists do the math right and don't end up with spiders the size of goats or something.
All new technology carries unacceptable risk... until they don't. But that's why science needs a constant feedback loop to improve understanding and safety. We can't make safe what we don't understand.
So can AK-47s.
| air rifle fires [...] at a muzzle velocity of
| 100 meters per second
| The GE Genesis Series I locomotive [...] travels at
| around 45 meters per second
| If you bounce a single BB off the front of the
| locomotive [...] you slow it down by about a foot
| per day
Metric is easier to do calculations in, while imperial is used for the "layman terms". The intended audience is mainly american, and feet are more familiar to them than meters.
| We were surprised to find out that the webbing
| was portrayed accurately.
Poor Peter would at least be thirsty after all that web shooting, if not wildly hungry.
Other design criteria include, for example, crash protection of the driver's cabin if it's a locomotive where the drivers sit at the very front, so that part's often very strong and rigid as it needs to preserve a 'survivability space' for the drivers.
For passenger cars, the body structure tends to have a lot of strength against longitudinal loads in order to combat the phenomenon of climbing. That is, in a railway collision with passenger cars, as the vehicles ride in to one another, there is the tendency for one to pop up/down and try to 'ride up/down' on top of/under the one in front. [3]
This was demonstrated rather tragically in a particular accident (I can't find its name, sorry) where old wooden passenger vehicles did this. Their comparatively strong underframe simply sliced through the comparatively weak cabins like horizontal blades and caused huge fatalities. This is because old passenger cars used to basically be flat-top wooden vehicles with a cabin placed on top, so the body structure was very strong compared to the weak cabin. Since then, passenger vehicles must be specifically designed not to climb up on one another and do that.
So really, in the sense of railway design, 300kN is minimal, especially when placed longitudinally down the length of the vehicle structure. They are far weaker against lateral collision so I guess if you ever want to cause a huge railway accident, hit a train side-on rather than end-on.
[1]: Not the standards themselves, as they're not publically available - https://www.aar.org/Pages/Home.aspx
[2]: By 'bulk yield' I mean yielding over a significant portion of the structure. This is a legacy of the AAR standards originally being targeted towards hand calculations, where you couldn't easily inspect every particular section of every particular beam but rather you calculated it as a whole. With the advent of finite element analysis you can now do that, so it's permissible to see slight yield-levels of stress in certain small parts so long as the overall section as a whole remains under it.
[3]: This will give a brief example of anti-climbers on rail vehicles: http://www.oleo.co.uk/products/rail/anti-climbers
- Ryan