Spider silk is tougher than Kevlar, yet labs have long failed to copy it, because nobody knew how a liquid protein becomes a solid thread. Quanta Magazine reports on work by Gregory Holland's team at San Diego State University on black widows. The liquid 'silk dope' first forms condensates, semi-liquid droplets, which then harden into fibre. Phosphate starts the process, and two amino acids act as molecular stickers.

Spiders do this at room temperature, while Kevlar needs extreme heat and acid. Even silk made with the exact natural protein sequence stays weaker than the real thing, so something beyond the recipe matters. And farming spiders is no option: a single shirt would need about a million cannibalistic spiders. A fine example of how patient research, not wishful thinking, uncovers how nature works.

Source: Yasemin Saplakoglu, Quanta Magazine (2026-10-28)

Summarised by the FTI newsdesk.