Sometimes a lady spider has to show off the goods. New research shows that female wolf spiders increase their dragline silk advertisements to get otherwise uninterested males’ attention.

Myth, busted: Spider silk might not have antibiotic properties after all Scientists extracted dragline silk from some spiders using a mechanical Lego apparatus.

Dragline silk is made by the major ampullate gland inside their abdomen. To figure out what makes this silk so special, the research team sequenced the gene transcripts — the intermediates between ...

Dragline silk combines toughness and strength to an extraordinary degree. A dragline strand is several times stronger than steel, on a weight-for-weight basis, but a spider's dragline is only ...

Spider silk has been pinpointed as a miracle material, with strength and stretch for a variety of purposes, including medicinal. ... Randy Lewis: It's called dragline silk, ...

Whereas human hair or Kevlar fibres barely show the slightest traces of twisting, the torsional response of dragline silk is impressive: as soon as humidity reaches about 70%, this can generate a huge ...

Spider silk is one of the most fascinating fibers in the field of materials science. In particular, its dragline thread is extremely tear-resistant, while also being elastic, lightweight and ...

In testing, they found that the silk they’d just created—identical to spider dragline silk in appearance—was 70 percent stronger. It was also more than twice as strong as a silkworm’s ...

The resulting material behaved like dragline silk. Its tensile strength, or resistance to being pulled apart, was measured at 1.03 gigapascals, about the same as for naturally produced dragline silk.

Dragline silk from the orb weaving spider has remarkable mechanical properties, including high tensile strength and flexibility. For the first time, ...