A PARACHUTE made from spider silk would be incredibly strong and
light—just pray it doesn’t rain. If it did, your chute could shrink and
you’d plunge to the ground. But now David Zax and his colleagues at Cornell
University, New York, think they are on the way towards stopping spider silk
shrinking when it gets wet.
Dragline thread, which spiders use as the main supports for their webs, is
flexible and yet stronger than steel, making it an engineer’s dream. But when
wet it can shrink to as little as 55 per cent of its original length. For a…
