(Nanowerk Spotlight) Protein fibers such as collagen fibers, hairs, and silks, are fundamental building blocks of life. They play an essential role in motility, elasticity, scaffolding, stabilization ...

Spider silk is prized for its strength. But spiders don’t make enough of the tough fibers to harvest for industrial uses. So researchers and biotech firms have turned to bioengineering silk with ...

Researchers are involved has developed a bioinspired method that for the first time will allow researchers to spin artificial silk fibers as spiders do and to efficiently produce kilometers of silk.

An international team of scientists has devised artificial silk that becomes a slim yet tough fiber, with help from a machine designed to mimic the spinning spiders do naturally. The silk isn’t quite ...

Silk is a naturally occurring fiber that silkworms use to make their protective cocoons. Most silk is produced for the luxury textiles market, although it has medical applications as well. This ...

In exploring the optical properties of the Madagascar comet moth's cocoon fibers, Columbia Engineering team discovers the fibers' exceptional capabilities to reflect sunlight and to transmit optical ...

The specific properties of the fiber, including its stiffness and toughness, can be controlled as needed simply by varying the speed of the extrusion process. These reconstituted fibers are also very ...

Scanning electron microscopy images of fibers from engineered spider silk. To validate their computational findings, the Northwestern team used spectroscopy techniques to examine how the protein ...

Pound for pound, spider silk is among the strongest known materials. Unfortunately, though, farming spiders for their silk is highly impractical. While some researchers are pursuing synthetic spider ...