Spider’s silk offers new twist in search for artificial muscles

A recently discovered property of spider’s silk could lead to new kinds of artificial muscles or robotic actuators, an international team of researchers has found.

The team has discovered supercontraction, which occurs above a certain level of relative humidity in the air causing the fibres in spider’s silk to simultaneously contract and twist. In doing so, they exert enough force to potentially be competitive with other materials being explored as actuators.

The findings are reported in Science Advances, in a paper by MIT Professor Markus Buehler, head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, along with former postdoc Anna Tarakanova and undergraduate student Claire Hsu at MIT; Dabiao Liu, an associate professor at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China; and six others including contributions from Queen Mary University of London.