Making bridges

After a while the wind will ruin this masterpiece. The tiny artist that created it has already moved on. One of the unknown properties of the spider’s web, is that it serves as a bridge to get through large gaps. The spider has no wings to fly, but nature has given it a unique gift for building bridges.

Research conducted at the Department of Applied Science at the College of William & Mary in Virginia, USA, revealed incredible things about the mystery that sorrounds the tissue’s durability: «Each fiber is made of a batch of nanofibers. Each of them is a thin thread composed of protein with a diameter of less than a millionth of an inch.» It’s like a tiny wire. Scientists still have too much work until they fully decode this structure and be able to reproduce them artificially.

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