spiders

Spider dragline silk is five times stronger than high-grade steel by weight and three times tougher than Kevlar, the material in bulletproof vests. A strand thinner than a human hair can stop a flying insect without snapping. Spiders achieve this using a protein-spinning process so precise that engineers have spent 50 years trying to reverse-engineer it — so far, with only partial success.

Spider silk is tougher than steel and Kevlar by weight — yet a spider produces it from liquid protein at room temperature in milliseconds, no factory required.