Inspired by extremely strong spider silk, researchers at NTNU have developed a new material that defies previously seen trade-offs between toughness and stiffness.
Many small animals grow their teeth, claws and other "tools" out of materials that are filled with zinc, bromine and manganese, reaching up to 20% of the material's weight. My colleagues and I call these "heavy element biomaterials," ...
Exquisitely preserved fossils left behind by creatures living more than half a billion years ago reveal in great detail identical structures that researchers have long hypothesized must have contributed to the archetypal ...
After a century of scientific confusion, we can now officially add five new species to Australia's long list of trapdoor spiders—secretive, burrowing relatives of tarantulas.
A team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, and Western Connecticut State University, has assembled the first draft genome of Phalangium opilio—the ...
Spider silk is said to be one of the strongest, toughest materials on the Earth. Now engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have designed amyloid silk hybrid proteins and produced them in engineered bacteria. The ...
Jumping spiders can distinguish living from non-living objects in their peripheral vision using the same cues used by humans and other vertebrate animals, according to a study publishing 15th July 2021 in the open-access ...
Researchers at the Biodiversity Unit of the University of Turku, Finland, study insect biodiversity particularly in Amazonia and Africa. In their studies, they have discovered hundreds of species previously unknown to science. ...
Scorpions and tarantulas are two ancient arachnids that have been walking the Earth for hundreds of millions of years—even before the time of the dinosaurs.
There are spiders that eat snakes. Observations of snake-eating spiders have been reported around the world. Two researchers from Basel and the US consolidated and analyzed over 300 reports of this unusual predation strategy.
