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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

To get the metal into preexisting dragline silk, the authors used an atomic layer deposition technique, which uses repeated pulses of vaporized material that contains metals.

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

Spiders such as Nephila clavipes, the golden orb-web spider, use dragline silk to anchor and stabilize their elaborate, orb-shaped webs. University of Akron researchers have found that dragline ...

The golden silk orb weaver (Nephila pilipes) creates dragline silk that prevents it from spinning while hanging from its web. More research into this silk could lead to fiber that mimic these ...