Spiders slow industrial growth

[Paul's Here 0]

Scientists make super-strong metallic spider silk

Spider silk is already tougher and lighter than steel, and now scientists have made it three times stronger by adding small amounts of metal.

The technique may be useful for manufacturing super-tough textiles and high-tech medical materials, including artificial bones and tendons.

"It could make very strong thread for surgical operations," researcher Seung-Mo Lee of the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle, Germany, said in a telephone interview.

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The idea was inspired by studies showing traces of metals in the toughest parts of some insect body parts. The jaws of leaf-cutter ants and locusts, for example, both contain high levels of zinc, making them particularly stiff and hard.

Spider silk has long fascinated scientists but producing it in commercial quantities is difficult because spiders kept in captivity tend to eat each other.

As a result, researchers have looked at alternative ways of producing silk without spiders, by duplicating their spinning technique.

Approaches being tried include deriving fiber from the milk of transgenic goats with an extra spider-silk gene and adapting silk produced by other insects, such as silkworms.

[Felix Quill 0]

Very interesting.

Rearden silk?

[Mindy Newton 0]

Very interesting.

Rearden silk?

Very interesting, indeed! Great quip, too.

Thanks for putting this up.