Spiderman’s Web Could Stop Moving Train

Spider-Man may be fictional, but apparently some of his superpowers exist in the real world. Three young physicists in the U.K. have determined that Spidey’s seemingly iron web—the one that stopped a runaway subway train in Spider-Man 2—would be “proportional to that of real spiders.” Eager to myth-bust a scene from the second Spider-Man movie, the team calculated that the silk webs of Darwin’s Bark spider, which has the strongest-known web, would in fact be able to stop four New York subway cars carrying 984 people. Meanwhile, across the pond, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago is developing a “SpiderSense” suit.