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Ed Yeates ReportingThe next time you see a spider, don't kill it, embrace it! That's what researchers are doing now after discovering the silk these little creatures spin in their webs may be able to stop a bullet or stitch up a wound.
Out with the creepy crawly villains, like those in movies. In with much more enduring creatures that can help mend a wound or weave a super strong fabric. That's how researchers look at them now, like Randy Lewis at the University of Wyoming.
Like a second spinerette, he wraps the silk as fast as the spider makes it. Why? Just one tenth the diameter of a human hair, the arachnid silk is super strong. So much so, researchers believe its resiliency could be densely weaved into a remarkable light-weight, bullet proof vest.
Dr. Glenn Prestwich at the University of Utah agrees.
Dr. Glenn Prestwich, University of Utah Medicinal Chemistry: "What it does is absorb the energy of the bullet. So the bullet hits it then gets thrown back. The spider silk, if it were properly woven, could probably absorb a thousand times more energy with a lot less weight."
Dr. Glenn Prestwich: "The weakest spider silk can go 20 percent, maybe like that. And the strongest, the most elastic spider silk can go like this."
So with this neat ability to spin such remarkable silk, are we going to see spiders weaving their webs all over the place in the catacombs of future research labs? Not quite!
Instead, Dr. Lewis wants to take genes encoding the special silk protein to see if it could be produced outside the spider. That's extremely difficult technology to pull off on a large scale.
So respect this elegant creature. Its ability to transform a liquid goo into a solid fiber makes it Nature's ultimate spinnerets, a mechanical maneuver that's still a mystery.
