FortKnox's Journal: Major Step In Producing Spider Silk

Spider Silk is long known to be one of the strongest biological structure made (5 times stronger than steel by weight). Biologists have already genetically engineered goats to produce spider silk in their milk. Now, they have successfully extracted the protein and "spun" the silk. The next, and final step, is to mass produce the silk to be available commercially. Move over kevlar, here comes something better! I want to have the first biologically built house! I wonder how insulated spider silk is....

Addendum: Normally I delete articles once they've been accepted and posted (the slashback article), however, since this has a post in it, I'll keep it up.

Insulation

[hodeleri]

The insulative potential of a material (I'm no expert here) is generally determined by how well the material transmits energy and how much ``null'' space (usually air) the material contains. I don't know how well spider silk transmits energy, but it shouldn't be difficult to spin it into something that has lots of empty spaces in it.

Forget goats: Cows

[kilroy_hau]

There's an article on wired [wired.com] that replaces goats with cows.