Now, the reason for why spiders form webs in the first place is to catch food using the sticky substance on the silk.
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Why doesn’t a spider’s web sag when it is windy?
Dr Hervé Elettro, a doctoral researcher at Institut Jean Le Rond D’Alembert, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, expalined: ‘Spider silk has been known to be an extraordinary material for around 40 years, but it continues to amaze us. The secret lies in thread itself which immediately spool inside the tiny droplets of watery glue and coats it in the spaces around the fibers of the capture spiral.
Vollrath was surprised to find out that in web’s watery skins there’s enough power to reel in loose bits of thread.
Just as Charlotte spun her specially designed webs to save her friend Wilbur, researchers studied web architecture in the hope of aiding human engineering.
An evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, Vollrath said his assumption was, in fact, what the spider did, if one scaled it all up.
A team of researchers from the University of Oxford and Marie Curie University in France looked into the so-called “capture silk” used by spiders.
British and French scientists develop a fiber with a “liquid wire” technique which was inspired in the solid and liquid properties of spider webs.
“[The web] totally switches behavior in compression to now become liquid-like: It shrinks with no apparent limit while exerting a constant tension”, researchers wrote in the paper.
A report published in the LA Times said, “Spiders spin a range of web shapes, from funnels to nests, but the classic orb-like structures remain something of an archetype”. The resulting fiber, a “fully self-assembling hybrid material with unprecedented mechanical function”, can fix itself when buckled under great weight and has few limits for its starting material.
The sticky coating that exists in a spider’s web has wonderful properties capable of creating a liquid wire that can be stretched several times its length, but still remains taught, says a team of British and French scientists. While the web is simply a high-tech trap from the spider’s point of view, its properties have a huge amount to offer the worlds of materials, engineering and medicine. The resulting artificial spider silk worked just like the spider’s natural winch silk; the spools of filament reeled and unreeled inside the oil droplets as the thread expanded and contracted. The silk has a tensile strength three times stronger than steel and it’s three times tougher than Kevlar, all while being as elastic as rubber.
The team were able to mimic this behaviour using plastic filaments coated in silicone oil, ethanol or other liquids, creating what they call liquid wires. It has been suggested that a Boeing 747 could be stopped in flight by a single pencil-width strand and spider silk is nearly as strong as Kevlar, the toughest man-made polymer. And it could have a wide range of applications in different industries, if and when the technology makes it past the testing stage.
Scientists have come up with a new material inspired by spider silk, which is famous for its toughness under stretching.
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Swathing silk for the wrapping and immobilisation of prey.
