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  3. New Understanding of Natural Silk’s Mysteries Natural silk, as we all know, has a strength that manmade materials have long

New Understanding of Natural Silk’s Mysteries Natural silk, as we all know, has a strength that manmade materials have long

admin2014-01-28  61
问题                 New Understanding of Natural Silk’s Mysteries
    Natural silk, as we all know, has a strength that manmade materials have long struggled to match. In a discovery that sounds more like an ancient Chinese proverh than a materials science breakthrough, MIT researchers have discovered that silk gets its strength from its weakness. Or, more specifically, its many weaknesses. Silk gets its extraordinary durability and ductility from an unusual arrangement of hydrogen bonds that are inherently very weak but that work together to create a strong, flexible structure.
    Most materials—especially the ones we engineer for strength—get their toughness from brittleness. As such, natural silks like those produced by spiders have long fascinated both biologists and engineers because of their light weight, ductility and high strength(pound for pound, silk is stronger than steel and far less brittle). But on its face, it doesn’t seem that silks should be as strong as they are; molecularly, they are held together by hydrogen bonds, which are far weaker than the covalent bonds found in other molecules.
    To get a better understanding of how silk manages to produce such strength through such weak bonds, the MIT team created a set of computer models that allowed them to observe the way silk behaves at the atomic level. They found that the arrangement of the tiny silk nanocrystals is such that the hydrogen bonds are able to work cooperatively, reinforcing one another against external forces and failing slowly when they do fail, so as not so allow a sudden fracture to spread across a silk structure.
    The result is that natural silks can stretch and bend while retaining a high degree of strength. But while that’s all well and good for spiders, bees and the like, this understanding of silk geometry could lead to new materials that are stronger and more ductile than those we can currently manufacture. Our best and strongest materials are generally expensive and difficult to produce(requiring high temperature treatments or energy-intensive processes).
    By looking to silk as a model, researchers could potentially devise new manufacturing methods that rely on inexpensive materials and weak bonds to create less rigid, more forgiving materials that are nonetheless stronger than anything currently on offer. And if you thought you were going to get out of this materials science story without hearing about carbon nanotubes, think again. The MIT team is already in the lab looking into ways of synthesizing silk-like structures out of materials that are stronger than natural silk—like carbon nanotubes. Super-silks are on the horizon.
Silk’s strength comes from its weak hydrogen bonds working together.
选项 A、Right
B、Wrong
C、Not mentioned
答案A
解析 根据文章第一段最后一句话可知，蚕丝的异常耐久性和延展性来自一种特别的氢键结构，这些氢键本质上非常脆弱，但它们共同创造了一种强壮而富有弹性的结构，题目说蚕丝的力量来自其链接在一起的氢键结构。
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