Strong, Flexible Spider Silk Created in Lab

Pound-for-pound, inch-for-inch, spider silk can absorb huge amounts of energy without ripping apart. Now, scientists have created a synthetic spider silk with many of the same properties as its wild counterpart, and they can produce it on a large scale — overcoming two limitations that have stymied past research in the area. For instance, in 2010 the National Science Foundation funded a project to genetically engineer goats to produce spider silk in their milk, while other projects focused