Japanese Researcher Crafts Violin Strings From the Silk of Three Hundred Spiders
Nature's toughest fiber can make bulletproof vests, future sutures, and even be engineered to come out of goat milk. Now a Japanese researcher has gone one step further, using spider silk for art. Specifically, a set of violin strings, which apparently have a "soft and profound timbre." The strings are made from the dragline silk of 300 female golden orb-weaver spiders from the species Nephila maculata. Each string is made of three bundles of spider draglines, each bundle containing between 3,000 and 5,000 strands of silk, according to the BBC. Shigeyoshi Osaki of Nara Medical University in Japan personally twisted these together. Related ArticlesHow Modified Worms and Goats Can Mass-Produce Nature's Toughest FiberVideo: Skin Augmented With Spider-Silk Stops a Speeding BulletSilk 'Invisibility Cloak' Could Lead to Better Biocompatible MetamaterialsTagsScience, Rebecca Boyle, acoustics, japanese scientist, music, sound waves, spider silk, spiders, violin string, violinsEach bundle was twisted in one direction, and...