According to an article on biologynews.net, scientists from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen and the University of Bayreuth have made a step forward in producing robust synthetic polymers with properties similar to spiderwebs.
The following is an excerpt from the article:
Five times the tensile strength of steel and triple that of the currently best synthetic fibers: Spider silk is a fascinating material. But no one has thus far succeeded in producing the super fibers synthetically. How do spiders form long, highly stable and elastic fibers from the spider silk proteins stored in the silk gland within split seconds? Scientists from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) and the University of Bayreuth have now succeeded in unraveling the secret. They present their results in the current issue of the prestigious scientific journal Nature.
In 2004, paleontologists digging in the Canadian Arctic unearthed the
fossil of a 375-million-year-old creature named Tiktaalik that possessed
both the scales of a fish and the sturdy, jointed limb bones of a land
animal—and this single, perfect transitional fossil bridged the
evolutionary gap between water and land, showing the exact moment our
distant ancestors began to crawl out of the sea.
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In 1999, three paleontologists made a decision that would, five years
later, lead them to one of the most important fossil discoveries of the
twenty-firs...
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