Scientists uncover the molecular marvel behind spider silk’s super powers

King's College London

Scientists have identified the molecular interactions that give spider silk its exceptional strength and flexibility, opening the door to new bio-inspired materials for aircraft, protective clothing and medical applications, and even advancing our understanding of neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.

The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  by researchers at King’s College London and San Diego State University (SDSU), establish general design principles that could guide the development of a new class of high-performance, sustainable fibres.

The joint research is the first to show how the amino acids that make up spider silk proteins interact to behave like molecular “stickers”.    

Chris Lorenz, Professor of Computational Materials Science at King’s College London, who led the UK side of the research, said: “The potential applications are vast - lightweight protective clothing, airplane components, biodegradable medical implants, and even soft robotics could benefit from fibres engineered using these natural principles.”

Spider dragline silk is stronger than steel by weight and tougher than Kevlar - the material used to fabricate bullet-proof vests. The exceptional natural material forms the framework of a spider’s web and is also used for suspension, and researchers have long sought to understand how to recreate its unique properties.

Dragline silk is produced in a spider’s silk gland, where proteins are stored as a concentrated liquid known as “silk dope” before being spun into solid fibres.

While it has been known that these proteins first condense into liquid-like droplets before being extruded into fibres, the molecular mechanism linking this process to the silk’s final structure has remained unclear.

The interdisciplinary team of chemists, biophysicists and engineers used a combination of advanced computational and experimental tools - including molecular dynamics simulations, AlphaFold3 structural modelling and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy - to demonstrate that the amino acids arginine and tyrosine interact to trigger the initial clustering of the proteins.

Crucially, these same interactions persist as the silk fibre forms, helping to create the complex nanostructure responsible for its exceptional mechanical performance.

“This study provides an atomistic-level explanation of how disordered proteins assemble into highly ordered, high-performance structures,” added Lorenz.

Gregory Holland, SDSU professor of physical and analytical chemistry, who led the US side of the research, said one of the most surprising outcomes was how chemically sophisticated the process turned out to be.

“What surprised us was that silk - something we usually think of as a beautifully simple natural fibre - actually relies on a very sophisticated molecular trick,” Holland said. “The same kinds of interactions we discovered are used in neurotransmitter receptors and hormone signalling.”

He suggested the findings could therefore extend into human health research.

“The way silk proteins undergo phase separation and then form β-sheet–rich structures      mirrors mechanisms we see in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s,” Holland said. “Studying silk gives us a clean, evolutionarily-optimized system to understand how phase separation and β-sheet formation can be controlled.”

 

---

Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

 

Batteries from rust? Carbon spheres filled with iron oxide deliver high storage capacity

Conventional lithium-ion batteries contain problematic substances such as nickel and cobalt, and the solvents used to coat the electrode materials are also toxic.

Saarland University

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Materials researcher Stefanie Arnold wants to make energy storage more environmentally friendly with the help of hollow carbon spheres.

view more 

Credit: Oliver Dietze/UdS

Conventional lithium-ion batteries contain problematic substances such as nickel and cobalt, and the solvents used to coat the electrode materials are also toxic. Materials scientists at Saarland University are therefore working to develop environmentally friendly alternatives. By introducing finely dispersed iron oxide into tiny, highly porous, hollow carbon spheres developed by Professor Michael Elsaesser at the University of Salzburg, the Saarbrücken team has achieved very promising results. Higher storage capacities using materials that are both readily available and environmentally far less problematic. The results have now been published in the journal Chemistry of Materials.

Anyone who has ever been to Salzburg in Austria will be acquainted with Mozartkugeln – the famous chocolate-coated balls of marzipan and nougat. And Mozartkugeln are a simple way of imagining the hollow carbon spheres that were developed by researchers at Salzburg University and are now being used at Saarland University to advance lithium-ion battery technology. Known as carbon spherogels, these novel materials are nanometre-sized units around 250 nm in diameter that offer a large surface area and high electrochemical capacity. ’The challenge for us is to use chemical synthesis to fill the cavity inside these spheres with suitable metal oxides,’ explains materials scientist Stefanie Arnold. After a set of initial experiments with titanium dioxide, whose ability to store and release lithium ions was relatively low, the team turned their attention to iron oxide, which most of us commonly refer to as rust. 

‘Iron has a number of advantages: it is abundant worldwide, it offers – in theory at least – a high storage capacity, and it's easy to recycle,’ says Stefanie Arnold, a postdoctoral researcher at Saarland University working with Professor Volker Presser, Professor of Energy Materials. Using a scalable synthesis methodology based on iron lactate, the Salzburg team was able to integrate different quantities of iron into the carbon framework of the hollow spheres, producing robust porous networks with evenly distributed iron nanoparticles. ‘What was particularly interesting was that the storage capacity (i.e., the amount of electric charge that can be reversibly stored and released per gram of active electrode material) continued to increase while the battery was in use. The longer the battery was used, the better it performed. This is because the elemental metallic iron in the nanoparticles first has to react with oxygen to form iron oxide. This process of electrochemical activation of the iron embedded in the carbon spherogel matrix is not immediate but happens progressively. It takes around 300 charge-discharge cycles until all the cavities in the carbon spheres are filled with iron oxide and the maximum storage capacity is reached,’ explains Arnold.

’Rust-based batteries’ are still a work in progress

However, further research is still needed before this mechanism can be used on an industrial scale. The activation process needs to be faster so that batteries can reach their maximum storage capacity sooner. In addition, the iron oxide-filled carbon spherogels are currently used as the battery anode; a suitable cathode still needs to be developed to obtain a complete cell. ‘We are confident that our approach will facilitate the development of environmentally friendly buffer storage systems for renewable energy,’ says Volker Presser, who also heads the Research Department Energy Materials at the INM – Leibniz Institute for New Materials in Saarbrücken. The new material will also be tested for sodium-ion batteries, which Chinese automotive manufacturers are already deploying. ‘These materials form a versatile technology platform that allows a wide variety of other substances to be integrated in situ into the spherogels in a single synthesis step, opening up opportunities for a wide range of technological applications,’ adds Michael Elsässer.

Developing new recycling methods and a climate-friendly energy supply

As part of the ‘EnFoSaar’ project, Stefanie Arnold is also investigating how lithium can be recovered from batteries and how future batteries should be designed so that they can be dismantled on an industrial scale. ‘We need efficient recycling methods and closed-loop material systems to minimize resource consumption and reduce waste in the battery supply chain,’ says Arnold. EnFoSaar is a major project that is being funded by the Saarland state government with €23 million from the Saarland Transformation Fund. It aims to develop innovative approaches for a climate-friendly energy supply and to drive the transformation of Saarland’s energy industry and the associated research landscape by developing innovative, scientifically sound, and practically implementable methodologies.

Original publication: 

Iron-Loaded Carbon Spherogels as Sustainable Electrode Materials for High-Performance Lithium-Ion Batteries, Authors: Saeed Borhani, Le Thi Thao, Gregor A. Zickler. Antje Quade, Michael S. Elsaesser, Volker Presser, Stefanie Arnold
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.chemmater.5c02442

Further information:

EnFoSaar transformation project: https://enfosaar.de/

Professor Volker Presser's research group: https://www.leibniz-inm.de/en/research/scientific-units/energy-materials/

Press release on the launch of the EnFoSaar project: https://www.uni-saarland.de/aktuell/enfosaar-35353.html

Questions can be addressed to:

Prof. Dr. Volker Presser
Department of Energy Materials at Saarland University
E-Mail: volker.presser(at)leibniz-inm.de

Dr. Stefanie Arnold
Department of Energy Materials at Saarland University
Tel. 0681 3024430
E-Mail: stefanie.arnold(at)uni-saarland.de

---

Journal

Chemistry of Materials

DOI

10.1021/acs.chemmater.5c02442 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Iron-Loaded Carbon Spherogels as Sustainable Electrode Materials for High-Performance Lithium-Ion Batteries

 

Ancient rocks reveal annual climate cycles during Snowball Earth

University of Southampton

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Artist’s impression of Earth around 700 million years ago during Snowball Earth

view more 

Credit: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Attribution must be given to Pablo Carlos Budassi.

Scientists at the University of Southampton have uncovered evidence from ancient rocks that the Earth’s climate continued to fluctuate during its most extreme ice age – known as Snowball Earth.

During the Cryogenian Period, between 720 and 635 million years ago, it has long been believed that Earth’s climate entirely shut down.

The planet experienced its most severe glaciations, with ice sheets reaching the tropics, and much of the Earth entirely frozen. It’s a state known as Snowball Earth, when the planet would have looked like a snowball from space.

These conditions were thought to have shut down much of the interaction between the atmosphere and oceans, muting short-term climate variability for millions of years.

But a new study, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, challenges that view. It shows that during at least one interval of Snowball Earth, climate oscillations occurred on annual, decadal, and centennial timescales – cycles strikingly similar to those seen in Earth’s climate system today.

The breakthrough comes from analysing exquisitely preserved laminated rocks, known as varves, on the Garvellach Islands off the west coast of Scotland. These sediments were deposited during the Sturtian glaciation, the most severe Snowball Earth event that lasted 57 million years.

Thomas Gernon, Professor of Earth and Planetary Science at Southampton and a co-author of the study, said: “These rocks preserve the full suite of climate rhythms we know from today – annual seasons, solar cycles, and interannual oscillations – all operating during a Snowball Earth. That’s jaw dropping. It tells us the climate system has an innate tendency to oscillate, even under extreme conditions, if given the slightest opportunity.”

Researchers examined 2,600 individual layers within the Port Askaig Formation, each recording a single year of deposition.

Lead researcher Dr Chloe Griffin, Research Fellow in Earth Science at the University of Southampton, said: “These rocks are extraordinary. They act like a natural data logger, recording year-by-year changes in climate during one of the coldest periods in Earth’s history. Until now, we didn’t know whether climate variability at these timescales could exist during Snowball Earth, because no one had found a record like this from within the glaciation itself.”

Microscopic analysis showed that the layers likely formed through seasonal freeze-thaw cycles in a calm, deep-water setting beneath ice. When the team used statistics to analyse variations in layer thickness, a surprising signal emerged.

“We found clear evidence for repeating climate cycles operating every few years to decades,” said Dr Griffin. “Some of these closely resemble modern climate patterns, such as El Niño-like oscillations and solar cycles.”

Brief disturbance in a frozen world

These climate cycles, however, were unlikely to have been the norm for Snowball Earth.

“Our results suggest that this kind of climate variability was the exception, rather than the rule,” explained Professor Gernon. “The background state of Snowball Earth was extremely cold and stable. What we’re seeing here is probably a short-lived disturbance, lasting thousands of years, against the backdrop of an otherwise deeply frozen planet.”

The research team ran climate simulations for Snowball Earth, which showed that a completely ice-sealed ocean would suppress most climate oscillations. However, if a small fraction, around 15 per cent, of the ocean surface remained ice-free, familiar atmosphere-ocean interactions could resume.

Dr Minmin Fu, Lecturer in Climate Science at the University of Southampton, who led the modelling work, said: “Our models showed that you don’t need vast open oceans. Even limited areas of open water in the tropics can allow climate modes similar to those we see today to operate, producing the kinds of signals recorded in the rocks.”

This finding supports a scenario in which Snowball Earth was generally frozen solid but punctuated by intervals, sometimes dubbed ‘slushball’ or more extensive ‘waterbelt’ states, when small patches of open ocean emerged.

Scotland’s unique rock record

The Scottish field site played a crucial role in unlocking this record.

Dr Elias Rugen, Research Fellow at Southampton who has worked on the Garvellach Islands for the past five years, said: “These deposits are some of the best-preserved Snowball Earth rocks anywhere in the world. Through them, you’re able to read the climate history of a frozen planet, in this case one year at a time.”

Understanding how Earth behaved during Snowball Earth matters far beyond deep time.

Professor Gernon said: “This work helps us understand how resilient, and how sensitive, the climate system really is. It shows that even in the most extreme conditions Earth has ever seen, the system could be kicked into motion. That has profound implications for how planets respond to major disturbances, including our own in the future.”

The research was supported by the WoodNext Foundation, a fund of a donor-advised fund program, whose generous support underpins Professor Gernon’s research group at the University of Southampton.

ENDS

---

Journal

Earth and Planetary Science Letters

DOI

10.1016/j.epsl.2026.119891 

Article Title

Interannual to multidecadal climate oscillations occurred during Cryogenian glaciation

Article Publication Date

4-Feb-2026

The remote Garvellach Islands off the west coast of Scotland

Study co-author Dr Elias Rugen surveys finely layered rocks on the Garvellach Islands

Close-up views of thin, repeating rock layers known as varves, each thought to represent a single year of sedimentation during Snowball Earth

Credit

Professor Thomas Gernon, University of Southampton

 

YouTubers love wildlife, but commenters aren't calling for conservation action

A careful analysis, powered in part by machine learning, highlights an opportunity for conservation messaging on social media

University of Michigan

FacebookXLinkedInWeChatBlueskyMessageWhatsAppEmail

 

image: 

Mammals feature prominently in YouTube's wildlife content. Research led by the University of Michigan has now characterized the comment attitudes for several different animals. Calls to action were consistently very low across species, which notably included wolves, whose legal protection status has been debated.

view more 

Credit: D. Van Berkel at al. Commun. Sustain. 2025 DOI: 10.1038/s44458-025-00018-2

YouTube is a great place to find all sorts of wildlife content. It is not, however, a good place to find viewers encouraging each other to preserve that wildlife, according to new research led by the University of Michigan.

Out of nearly 25,000 comments posted to more than 1,750 wildlife YouTube videos, just 2% featured a call to action that would help conservation efforts, according to a new study published in the journal Communications Sustainability.

"Our results basically show that people like to watch videos of zoos and safaris and that they appreciate the aesthetics and majesty of certain animals," said author Derek Van Berkel, associate professor at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability, or SEAS. "But there really wasn't much of a nuanced conversation about conservation." 

Although he didn't expect to see most commenters urging other YouTube users to call their elected officials or to support conservation groups, "I was hoping there might be more," Van Berkel said. "I thought it might be bigger than 2%."

Despite the low number, however, the team believes the report still has an optimistic take-home message.

"The flip side of this is we can and should do better at messaging, and there's a huge potential to do so," said study co-author Neil Carter, associate professor at SEAS. 

While individual YouTube viewers weren't organically calling for conservation action, there was also a notable absence of conservation groups and influencers working to start conversations and sharing actionable information in the comments.

"There's tremendous untapped potential for conservation messaging to be improved," Carter said.

Unlike many other social media platforms, YouTube provided sufficiently accessible, detailed and structured data to provide insights into the digital culture around wildlife conservation, Van Berkel said. And the data was just the starting point.

YouTube's 8M dataset contained information for nearly 4,000 videos that had been classified as wildlife. The researchers trimmed the list by more than half by selecting videos that featured at least one English language comment and that they could categorize into one of seven topic areas. Those included footage from zoos, safaris and hunting. 

The next step was characterizing the comments by the attitudes they expressed. The team arrived at five different categories for these. Expressions of appreciation and concern, both for wildlife and humans, made up four of the categories. The fifth was calls to action.

With the categories and the criteria for each defined, the team created a "gold set" of comment attitudes from 2,778 comments assigned by hand. The researchers then used this data to train a machine learning model to assess more than 20,000 additional comments.

Those steps were painstaking and labor intensive—the team hired additional participants to crowdsource the construction of the comment attitude gold set. But one of the biggest challenges was training the machine learning algorithm on what calls to action looked like when there were so few to begin with, said co-author Sabina Tomkins, assistant professor at the U-M School of Information.

"If the label you're looking for happens far less often than the others, that problem is really hard. You're looking for a needle in a haystack," she said. "The way we solved that challenge was by looking at the models very carefully, figuring out what they were doing."

Tomkins said the effort from the School of Information graduate students who were part of the research team—Sally Yin, Hongfei Mei, Yifei Zhang and Nilay Gautam—was a driving force behind the project. Enrico Di Minin, a professor at the University of Helsinki, also contributed to the work, which was funded in part by the European Union.

  

Analyzing the comments on YouTube videos about wildlife, research led by the University of Michigan showed the comments most commonly expressed appreciation for animals—except in the case of hunting videos. In those, appreciation for animals was second to appreciation for humans. Calls to action were consistently low across all video categories, even the one that included videos focused on conservation. 

Credit

D. Van Berkel at al. Commun. Sustain. 2025 DOI: 10.1038/s44458-025-00018-2

---

Journal

Communications Sustainability

DOI

10.1038/s44458-025-00018-2 

Article Title

YouTube content on wildlife engages audiences but rarely drives meaningful conservation action

Article Publication Date

5-Feb-2026