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 ...

Japan-based biochemist Ali Malay has long questioned traditional theories about how spiders make their silk. “The prevailing hypotheses seemed like magic, because, according to it, you suddenly ...

Simulations showed that stretching aligns protein chains and increases hydrogen bonds, which act like tiny bridges between ...

An curved arrow pointing right. Following is a transcript of the video. Narrator: A spider's web is more than just a spider's house. This homemade, glistening material has some spidey strength of ...

Computational analysis provides new insights into silk's mechanical properties that was unavailable experimentally ...

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 ...

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 ...

Companies spend thousands developing a project for the market, hoping their investment will return big. Investing like this happens every day and won’t shock anyone. What may surprise you is ...

When Spider-man made his own webbing in his high school chemistry class, he was smart to try to mimic spider silk. After all, the real stuff is pound for pound, stronger than steel. He also seems ...

By simulating spider silk in a computational model, the team discovered the stretching process aligns the protein chains within the fibers and increases the number of bonds between those chains.

Kamal is a freelance science journalist based in the UK with a PhD in virology from the University of Cambridge. View Full Profile. Learn about our Editorial Policies. Researchers don’t know enough ...