The animals transform soluble proteins called spidroins into silk fibers of tensile strength and extensibility superior to those of man-made fibers. Researchers want to understand how spidroins come together at the molecular level so they can better design synthetic fibers.Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay...
How are Spider Webs Made? Spider web construction begins with liquid silk being produced in the spider’s internal silk glands. Each silk gland has a faucet-like structure called a spigot which is located on the surface of the spider’s spinnerets. Spinnerets are located on the tip of the...
Spider silk is more durable and elastic than the strongest man-made fiber, Kevlar, which is used to fill bulletproof vests, said Fritz Vollrath, an evolutionary zoologist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark and an expert on spider silk, in an interview with Discover magazine. ...
Tens of thousands of spider species have been identified throughout the world. These arachnids have eight legs, two body segments, and no wings or antennae. Spiders have three or four pairs of eyes. Many spiders have poor vision, but some species of spiders, such as the jumping spider, hav...
Silk is the strongest natural textile in the world. This textile was just recently surpassed in strength by alab-engineered biomaterial, but it remains the strongest fabric made through natural processes.
[silk is] supported on both ends. We knew it had to be very lightweight and very flexible; you don't want it to float away. You've got to hold it down somehow. Supporting it on each end made it easier," Miles said. "The truth is, in nature, there are just countless systems ...
They started by analysing the silk of a brown recluse spider using an atomic force microscope. They observed that each strand is made up of thousands of parallel nanostrands, which bind together to create a single thread. To put this into perspective, a complete strand is 1000 times thinner ...
which are directly in front of her gonopore. Once completed, the sperm remains stored inside the female spider in specialized receptacles. This sperm fertilizes the spider's eggs as they pass through the oviduct before being laid via the gonopore into an egg sac made of silk, which may ...
“But one of the challenges is they are absolute experts at their craft and they've created these insanely detailed worlds that we needed to expand on,” says Rechner. “And not only did we need to expand on it, but we needed to make sure that when we expanded on it, it made sense...
have been made—including the deciphering of the genomes of numerous species (including our own); and, even more impressively, the successful manipulation of the genetic code to introduce the features of one species to another (for example, having a goat produce spider’s silk out of its milk...