“All natural” just got a bit more interesting. Companies Polartec, provider of sustainable textile solutions, and Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, a biotechnology company centered on the development and ...

Silk proteins generated by bacteria engineered to convert polyethylene into this multipurpose material. Credit: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Move over Spider-Man: Researchers at Rensselaer ...

Understanding how the stretching process strengthens spider silk is a key part of helping design stronger, biodegradable, silk-inspired materials for various applications. When spiders spin their webs ...

As one of the strongest materials known to science, spider silk regularly finds itself at the center of exciting engineering breakthroughs, and a new study involving a quick chemical bath could take ...

Silkworms have been genetically engineered with CRISPR to produce pure spider silk for the first time. The worms could offer a scalable way to create things like surgical thread or bulletproof vests ...

In the world of material engineering, two key concepts are material strength and extensibility. Strength is mostly self-explanatory, but extensibility allows for a material to be extended or stretched ...

Researchers report on a new model for spider silk assembly. The key to spider silk 'spinning' is a combination of acidification and a process known as liquid-liquid phase separation, or LLPS. Of all ...