The Reinvention of Silk

NEW USES Silk creations by Tufts University researchers include a coil made of silk substrate and gold that can help tell when food goes bad.

By HENRY FOUNTAIN
NYT

As some silk researchers see it, if spiders were gregarious vegetarians, the world might be a different place.

For spiders are nature’s master silk makers, and over millions of years of evolution have developed silks that could be useful to people — from sticky toothpastelike mush to strong and stretchy draglines.

“There’s not just one kind of material we’re talking about,” said Cheryl Hayashi, who studies the evolutionary genetics of spider silk at the University of California, Riverside. “You can look in nature, and there are a lot of solutions already made. You want a glue? There’s a silk that’s already a glue.”

For years there has been talk of the bright promise of spider silk: that it might one day be used to make cables that are stronger than those of steel, for example, or bulletproof vests that are more effective than those made of Kevlar.

(More here.)