Famously, spider silk is tougher than both steel and kevlar. That is, out of the three materials, it can absorb the most energy before breaking—a strand of silk may be able to stretch to up to five times the length of its relaxed state before giving way. With a material that's both as light as a parachute and strong as a bullet-proof vest, nature really figured something out with its arachnids. And, gradually, human scientists are figuring it out too.

Mechanical engineering researchers at MIT have devised a new method of studying the still somewhat mysterious properties of spider silk via computational modeling and mechanical analysis, with the result being a technique for 3D printing the material—weaving synthetic spider webs, in other words. Their work is described in a paper published Friday in Nature Communications.