Shape memory in spider draglines
- 29 March 2006
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Springer Science and Business Media LLC in Nature
- Vol. 440 (7084), 621
- https://doi.org/10.1038/440621a
Abstract
The ductility and strength of spider draglines means that they outperform the best synthetic fibres1,2,3,4,5, but surprisingly little is known about the torsional properties of this remarkable filament. Unlike a mountain climber swinging from a rope, a spider suspended from its silk thread hardly ever twists. Here we show that a spider dragline has a torsional shape ‘memory’ in that it can reversibly and totally recover its initial form without any external stimulus; its observed relaxation dynamics indicate that these biological molecules have successively different torsional constants.This publication has 10 references indexed in Scilit:
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