What does Spiderman eat for breakfast?

While stuck in a hotel room I got sucked into watching the 2002 Spiderman movie. And it struck me that Peter Parker must have an enormously high-protein diet to generate all that spider silk he goes through. So being the ...

Engineering self-assembling amyloid fibers

Nature has many examples of self-assembly, and bioengineers are interested in copying or manipulating these systems to create useful new materials or devices. Amyloid proteins, for example, can self-assemble into the tangled ...

GM silkworms bred to spin fluorescent

(Phys.org) —Scientists in Japan have genetically engineered silkworms to create red, green or orange silks that glow under fluorescent lights.

A silky spin on protective armor

At seven times the toughness of Kevlar, a silk produced by the Caerostris darwini spider of Madagascar is more robust than any other material—synthetic or natural. Most spider silks are about two times tougher than Kevlar, ...

Researchers synthesize a new kind of silk fiber (w/ video)

Pound for pound, spider silk is one of the strongest materials known: Research by MIT's Markus Buehler has helped explain that this strength arises from silk's unusual hierarchical arrangement of protein building blocks.

Hagfish slime as a model for tomorrow's natural fabrics

Nylon, Kevlar and other synthetic fabrics: Step aside. If new scientific research pans out, people may be sporting shirts, blouses and other garments made from fibers modeled after those in the icky, super-strong slime from ...

Silkworms spinning spider webs

(PhysOrg.com) -- A spiders silk is strong and more elastic and has a large range of possible medical applications. However, spiders have a history of being territorial and prone to cannibalism, so the idea of having a large ...

Why spiders don't drop off of their threads

It has five times the tensile strength of steel and is stronger then even the best currently available synthetic fibers: Spider thread. German scientists of the Technische Universitaet Muenchen and the Universitaet Bayreuth ...

Genetically engineered spider silk for gene therapy

Genetically engineered spider silk could help overcome a major barrier to the use of gene therapy in everyday medicine, according to a new study that reported development and successful initial laboratory tests of such a ...

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