Understanding how the stretching process strengthens spider silk is a key part of helping design stronger, biodegradable, silk-inspired materials for various applications. When spiders spin their webs ...

Whether you are a fan of spiders or terrified of them, you can’t help but admire their ability to make webs. These fascinating and unique structures are incredible feats of engineering that combine ...

The number of times I have walked into a spider web is pretty comical. At first, I saw them as a nuisance during my forest adventures, but upon a closer look with my macro lens, I began to notice that ...

Spider silk, already known for its exceptional strength, reveals an astonishing manufacturing process. Researchers have discovered that stretching plays a key role in the solidity of these ...

While spider silk proteins are something you can make in your garage, making useful drag line fibers has proved a daunting challenge. Now, a team of scientists from Japan and Hong Kong are closer to ...

Stronger than steel and more eco-friendly than plastic, spider silk is an alluring substance for material scientists. 1 However, researchers know little about the proteins that comprise it and how ...

Dragline silk or major ampullate (MA) silk, the part of a spider's web that forms the main frame and spokes, is one of the toughest materials known to science. That is, it can absorb massive amounts ...

Scanning electron microscopy images of fibers from engineered spider silk. To validate their computational findings, the Northwestern team used spectroscopy techniques to examine how the protein ...