Humidity-Driven Supercontraction and Twist in Spider Silk

Spider silk is an incredible material!
Check out our new paper at Physical Review Letters:

Spider silk is a protein material that exhibits extraordinary and nontrivial properties such as the ability to soften, decrease in length (i.e., supercontract), and twist upon exposure to high humidity. These behaviors stem from a unique microstructure in combination with a transition from glassy to rubbery as a result of humidity-driven diffusion of water. In this work we derive a multi-scale model that explains the experimentally observed behaviors.

This work paves the way to the design of new biomimetic materials with unique programmable properties.

Read here: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.128.098101