Researcher and team are the first to measure all of the elastic properties of an intact spider's web, drawing a remarkable picture of the behavior of one of nature’s most intriguing structures. The work could lead to new “bio-inspired” materials that improve upon nature.
As fibers go, there’s never been anything quite like spider silk. Stretch it. Bend it. Soak it. Dry it out. Spider silk holds up. It is five times stronger than steel and can expand nearly a third greater than its original length and snap right back like new. Ounce-for-ounce spider silk is even stronger than Kevlar, the man-made fiber used in bulletproof vests.
It would be understandable to think that science knows all there is to know about the remarkable physics of spider silk, but the truth is far from that. Now, using a long-known-but-underutilized spectroscopy technique, a Stanford researcher has shed new light on the mysteries of spider silk.
On January 27, in a paper in the journal Nature Materials, post-doctoral scholar Kristie Koski described how she was able, for the first time, to non-invasively, non-destructively examine the mechanical properties of an intact, pristine spider web just as it was spun by the spider that created it. Koski is a researcher in the Yi Cui Group in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University and the first author of the study. The work was performed when she was a post-doc under Professor Jeff Yarger at Arizona State University.
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