Everyone knows Spider-Man, the red-suited hero who uses webs to swing across New York.

Well, scientists have put us one step closer to his technology really existing.

So far, the only application of this was done through CGI.

It's Thursday, December 19th, better known as Science Friday.

I'm SciFri-producer Charles Bergquist.

Silk's a really interesting fiber,

and at Tufts University, the Silk Lab is working on all sorts of applications for it.

One recent breakthrough is a liquid silk

that can shoot out of a needle, stick to an object, and then harden it. Then, just like Spider-Man,

that object can be picked up using the silk solution. We'll get to that story in just a bit,

but first here's Cy-Fry producer Rasharidi to tell us about a public health project to

detect cancer in India.

To learn more about the Discovering Hands program in India, I spoke with science journalist Kamala

Theagrajan, based in Monterey in southern India.

She reported on this for NPR's Global Health blog, Goats and Soda. Kamala, welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you so much for having me on. So Kamala, what is Discovering Hands? And where did it start?

The Discovering Hands program started in Germany. And it was founded by a German gynecologist, Dr. Frank Hoffman.

And he just wanted to set up the program as a means of helping doctors out

and doctors who were having really crowded waiting rooms and didn't have time to do

thorough breast examination.

So he wanted to train women to be able to do it for them, to someone to help them out.

So that's how it started. The

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