Silk draglines and reverse engineering
Spider draglines appear to be a good candidate for reverse-engineering. According to an article published last week in Nature:
The ductility and strength of spider draglines means that they outperform the best synthetic, 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.
The article is a pretty non-technical and a fun read.
