When compared weight-for-weight, spider silk has a higher tensile strength than steel yet is almost as elastic as rubber. Leading manmade fibers such as nylon are less than half as tough. What’s more, ...

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

Spiders don’t just spin webs—they engineer them. By stretching their silk as they spin, spiders strengthen the fibers at the ...

When they weave their webs, spiders pull their silk threads. New simulations show stretching during spinning causes the protein chains within the fibers to align and the number of hydrogen bonds ...

Spider silk, already known for its exceptional strength, reveals an astonishing manufacturing process. Researchers have ...

“When they spin silk out of their silk gland, spiders use their hind legs to grab the fiber and pull it out. That stretches ...

This pulling action doesn’t just help the spider release the silk, it’s also a crucial step in strengthening the silk fibers for a more durable web. In a new study, Northwestern Engineering ...

This pulling action doesn't just help the spider release the silk, it's also a crucial step in strengthening the silk fibers for a more durable web. In a new study, Northwestern University ...

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 ...