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Scientists exploring the Peruvian Amazon have discovered a spider that builds giant decoy "spiders" to hang in its web. 
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Scoop.it!
Extolling the many virtues of spider silk is something of a trend these days, as the fine yet remarkably hardy material continues to best even the strongest synthetic materials (a good spider silk weave is supposedly four times stronger than Kevlar). But this latest application makes transgenic, spider silk-producing goats seem simple by comparison: A bioengineered skin so tough that it stops a speeding bullet from penetrating.
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Horizon presenter Adam Rutherford looks at the advances in synthetic biology and genetic engineering that have resulted in, among other things, computer-made life forms and cancer assassin cells...
Josh COok's curator insight,
November 13, 2014 10:29 AM
This is absolutely amazing. Having goats that make silk that we can use as a product for many things including medicine is remarkable. If we do this with other animals, who knows what we could get animals to make that we can harvest and use.
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http://www.ted.com Cheryl Hayashi studies spider silk, one of nature's most high-performance materials. Each species of spider can make up to 7 very differen...
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Researchers have shown for the first time how Golden orb web spiders (Nephila antipodiana) add a chemical to their web silk to repel invading ants.
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Maria Albo, Gudrun Winther, Cristina Tuni, Søren Toft and Trine Bilde at Aarhus University in Denmark set out to see if the quality of the gift would affect whether or not a female mates, and if she does mate, how long she mates for. The research team went outside and collected a bunch of juvenile nursery web spiders, and then raised them up on a housefly diet until adulthood (This way the researchers knew that all the spiders were virgins, which is important). Then they offered males items to wrap: a normal housefly, a protein-enriched housefly, a worthless gift (a cotton ball, dry flower head or leftovers of a previously eaten fly), or nothing at all. They allowed each male to interact with a female for up to 30 minutes, and observed the female responses.
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With their keen vision and deadly-accurate pounce, jumping spiders are the cats of the invertebrate world. For decades, scientists have puzzled over how the spiders’ miniature nervous systems manage such sophisticated perception and hunting behavior. A new study of Adanson’s jumping spider (Hasarius adansoni) fills in one key ingredient: an unusual form of depth perception.
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Using a new mathematical methodology, researchers at MIT have created a scientifically rigorous analogy that shows the similarities between the physical structure of spider silk and the sonic structure of a melody, proving that the structure of each...
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Male nursery web spiders (Pisaura mirabilis) prepare silk-wrapped gifts to give to potential mates.
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