Re: The Amazing Spider - Man Tamil Dubbed 1080p Online
Sibyl Piccuillo
Biophysicists at Johns Hopkins University have discovered one of the keys to the super-elasticity of spiders' webs, finding that proteins in the silk used to make the webs act like supersprings and can stretch to five times their initial length.
The investigators are working on a tool that measures the pushes and pulls sensed by proteins in living cells, a tool that will shed light on many biological events, including the shifting forces between cells during cancer metastasis. Details of their research were published online in the journal Nano Letters on Feb. 5.
"All other known springs, biological and nonbiological, lengthen in a way that is directly proportional to the force applied to them only until they have been stretched to about 120 percent of their original length," says Taekjip Ha, the study's lead researcher. "At that point, you have to apply more and more force to stretch them the same distance as before. But the piece of spider silk protein we focused on continues to stretch in direct proportion to the force applied until it reaches its maximal stretch of 500 percent."
The Virginia team inserted a repeating amino acid sequence taken from the spider silk protein known as flagelliform into a human protein called vinculin. Using fluorescence microscopy, the scientists were able to watch the forces acting on vinculin in live cells in real time. Ha's team helped translate what was seen under the microscope into measurements of force.
"Usually, unstructured proteins show disorderly, nonlinear behavior when we pull on them," says Ha. "The fact that these don't act that way means that they will be really useful tools for studying protein mechanics because their behavior is easy to understand and predict."
Already, Ha says, the flagelliform insert from the previous research has been used to study many biological phenomena, including the shifting forces between cells during cancer metastasis and the pushing and pulling of cells during the development of simple, multicelled organisms, like worms.
"Tension is important for many activities inside cells," Ha says. "Cells sense mechanical forces in their environments and change their behaviors and functions in response. Now we have a way to watch and understand these forces and how they are transmitted at a molecular level in living cells."
Review/plot:
I am not a big fan of J.M. DeMatteis. I find his dialogue to be lifeless and his plots overly focused on cosmic or new age-y minutiae at the expense of good storytelling. His Defenders run took a book that was Marvel's wildest (Gerber, Kraft, and even, in his own way, Hannigan) and sucked all the soul from it while failing to make it a fun super-hero book (which Gillis did). Even books where he was forced to be more grounded, like Captain America, always felt just average to me.
I seem to be in the minority on this. Most people consider DeMatteis to be one of the good ones, and that's before getting to his non-Marvel universe stuff like Moonshadow. I also have a friend who has spent a lifetime trying to get me to read his acclaimed JLI run with Keith Giffen and Kevin Maguire (one day, one day...), which, by the way, was beginning around this time. Because of all this, as i read through all of his stuff again for my project, i was torn between two biases; "ugh, DeMatteis, this won't be good" and "ok, what am i missing here?".
One thing that immediately stands out as you flip through the pages of these issues (which i have in a trade) is how sparse it is. There isn't much dialogue. Thought bubbles are replaced with narration panels, and are also kept short. DeMatteis is willing to step back and let Mike Zeck (his collaborator on much of his Captain America run) tell the story. Another way of seeing that is by checking the Characters Appearing. It's a small cast for a six issue story, and on top of that, Spider-Man himself is out of the picture for a good portion, and the other two main characters, Kraven and Vermin, are crazy and barely verbal, respectively. Actually, both are crazy and barely verbal, to different degrees.
The key background for the story is that Kraven's parents were driven out of Czarist Russia "some seventy odd years ago" because of the Communist revolution, with his aristocratic parents not adjusting well to a life among commoners in America. His mother, in particular, was said to be "insane" and eventually killed herself. And we see that depression as afflicting Kraven as well.
In many ways this is Kraven's story moreso than it's Spider-Man's, with a kind-of deconstruction of the character, perhaps allowing manic-depression to explain his honorable-yet-villainous past behavior.
DeMatteis doesn't totally get away from the mystical stuff here. There is a lot of talk about totem animals, with Spider-Man being the spider that infected and tore down the civilization that his parents belonged to. And with Kraven covering himself in spiders, eating them, so that he can gain their power and face and defeat Spider-Man in their final confrontation.
You want to be careful with stuff like this; it'll eventually lead to things like The Other. But for now, it's all plausibly dismissed as coincidence or just Kraven's delusional interpretation of things.
One thing i have mixed feelings about it when Spider-Man first encounters Kraven in this story and is trapped in a net. And he first gets dismissive, saying that Kraven is just like those other villains like Doc Ock and the Vulture, and he's just going to take me off to some lair somewhere and talk his ear off while giving him a chance to escape. And then he gets really nervous when he sees the rifle.
I like it in the moment of the story, and i like it as a deconstruction of super-hero comic conventions, but i don't like it in the sense that it's elevating Kraven at the expense of, say, Doc Ock. Super-villains are only as dangerous and effective as they are allowed to be, and there's nothing special about Kraven in that regard. In fact, he's done plenty of monologuing of his own in the past. But it's worth remembering that we're at the point now where these conventions are being challenged, thanks largely to the works of Alan Moore and Frank Miller. And i like that, but at the same time it could have been done without this realization that oh, he's not like those other silly villains.
Mary Jane is also in this place, but mainly to becoming increasingly worried about what's happened to Peter. It's a little alarming that she's not even sure about the name of one of Peter's main foes, but i do like that she's not afraid of a rat in her apartment...
...and he likes it in the sewer because
in the dark no one can sssee you or touch you or tell you what to do". But he starts to work himself up to going out again and soon starts a killing spree; all female victims. One woman he doesn't kill is a pudgy black police officer, who reminds him of his mother.
When Peter is missing for a period of "weeks" (later clarified to just two weeks), she briefly goes to Joe Robertson, but finds that she can't say anything to him. "Even if he does know -- I can't tell him."
Considering that Vermin is a DeMatteis character, it's a little bit of a self-serving plot point. I half-expect Peter Parker to shout from his grave, "Dude, i didn't beat him alone because it was an issue of Marvel Team-up! And if you look at the end of that comic, we actually took care of him quite handily!"). Nonetheless, it's a pretty powerful fight.
Thus, with the story half over, we're ready for Peter Parker to come back. We start with something on the metaphorical/totem level. While Kraven was so focused on becoming The Spider, Peter rejects his spider side.
However, he later goes back out after Kraven. The scene with him leaving MJ, with her kind of accepting the fact that she's now married to a guy that goes out and risks his life on a regular basis, is nice. We've seen this kind of scene a few times before - it was possible ever since it was revealed that MJ knew Peter's secret ID - but it's done well here and takes on new meaning now that they're married (it's also worth realizing that this is the first story to take place after Peter and MJ's wedding - which is almost a coincidence but still shows that Peter is a viable character after the marriage).
This is a moment of lucidity for Kraven. He's more sane than he's seemed earlier in the story. And his reasoning makes perfect sense for the character. Kraven is a hunter. If this story were about Doctor Octopus, the fact that Doc Ock could have killed Spider-Man but didn't would have different meaning than it does for Kraven, who always hunted Spider-Man because of the challenge it presented, not because of any personal animosity or because Spidey was trying to foil his criminal schemes. At the same time, Spider-Man could argue that he could have equally killed Kraven all the times that he's defeated him in the past, but the fact that he didn't is probably in Kraven's mind part of what makes him Superior.
In any event, the real confrontation that Kraven has in mind is a one-on-one battle between Spider-Man and Vermin, with the idea being that if Spider-Man can't defeat Vermin, then Kraven really is Superior. And despite his more rational voice, he still is pretty clearly not in reality, thinking it a "joke" that he is responsible for anything that's happening here...
...but, something that i've always liked about Vermin's past appearances is that he seems to bring out a kind of revulsion in the people he's fighting. It's never commented on or specifically confirmed, but it does seem to be the case that heroes that fight Vermin eventually lose sight of their heroism and unleash primal rage and disgust against him.
Anything after that should almost feel like an epilogue, but DeMatteis and Zeck (and i shouldn't neglect Bob McLeod's dark inks) keep the final fight between Spider-Man and Vermin interesting. Peter is still traumatized by his "death" and burial, and that's brought back by the claustrophobic sewers where Vermin is hiding.
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