Artificial spider silk mimics how it acts as liquid and solid

Spider silk has long been hailed for its wondrous properties, such as incredible toughness. Now researchers have found a weird kind of webbing that acts as both a liquid and a solid. What's more, they've created an artificial version that could find use in soft robotics. Arnaud Antkowiak of the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, France, and his colleagues studied the "capture silk" of an orb-weaver spider – the sticky silk that makes up the spiral of a spider's web, rather than the radial spokes that hold it together. When they stretched the silk, they found it extended like a spring, just as you would expect from a solid material.