Spiders

It’s no secret that spider silk is one of nature’s most incredible materials. Now scientists have discovered a weird new ability. A team led by MIT has found that when exposed to a certain level of humidity, spider silk suddenly shrinks and twists, which could make it useful in artificial muscles.

Strong as steel and tougher than Kevlar, spider silk is one of nature’s most impressive materials. Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have now engineered bacteria to produce biosynthetic spider silk that they say performs as well as the real stuff.

If robots are ever going to work alongside humans in the real world, they're going to need a softer touch. Harvard researchers have developed a new method for producing small-scale squishy robots, and demonstrated it by creating a flexible robotic peacock spider, driven by a microfluidics system.

Spider silk has long held the title of strongest natural biomaterial. Now, researchers at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology have developed a new biomaterial out of wood nanofibers that steals the strength record.

Spider silk is among the strongest known materials. While some researchers are pursuing synthetic spider silk, scientists at MIT have taken another approach … they've devised a method of using silkworm silk to produce fibers that are almost as stiff as spider silk.

​Natural spider silk is already amazingly strong stuff, plus scientists have developed synthetic versions of the material. Now, however, researchers have split the difference – they've created silk that comes from spiders, but that has added man-made ingredients which give it extra strength.

Peter Parker take note, architects and chemists at the University of Cambridge have come up with an artificial spider silk that is strong, super-stretchy, non-toxic and sustainable, yet is made from a material that is 98 percent water.

Butterfly wings are covered with microscopic structures that reflect visible light in such a way that it appears as vivid colors. Blue tarantulas also possess this quality, although as scientists recently discovered, they've put their own special spin on it.

Lightweight and extremely strong, spider silk is ideal for use in many applications. Unfortunately, large numbers of spiders are hard to handle and produce very little silk individually. Now researchers have created a prototype process to spin silk thread grown by bacteria on a large scale.