Next time you sweep away a spiderweb, think of the millions of years of evolutionary engineering you are casually brushing aside.
Scientists for years have worked to unlock the fantastic capabilities of silk for its medical, microelectronic and light-manipulation potential.
And of course, for centuries, tailors have been aware of the uses of similar material from silkworms in fashion.
Now researchers in Texas, Europe and Singapore have uncovered another amazing feature of spider's silk.
In much the same way that a semiconductor controls the flow of electrons, spider silk can control the flow of sound and heat.
The dean of engineering at Rice University, Edwin Thomas, says that understanding this process will enable the development of new "tunable" materials for sonic and thermal insulation. The findings were published this week in Nature Materials.
Spiders use their webs to receive and send vibrating signals to locate prey and detect defects in their spun structures. So silk can transmit sounds that the arachnids interpret to understand their environment.
What Professor Thomas and his team have discovered is that there are gaps in the sound frequencies that travel along the webs that change depending on how stressed the material is. When contracted, sound slows down; when strained, it speeds up. And there are frequencies where the sound is blocked altogether.
It is this "phononic gap" in the crystalline structure that has the potential to unlock a whole new field of nano-engineered materials for use in medicine and engineering.
"Phononic crystals give you the ability to manipulate sound waves. And if you get sound small enough and at high enough frequencies, you're also talking about heat," Professor Thomas said.
Packets of electricity are called electrons; packets of light are photons. And packets of sound energy are called phonons.
Manipulation of phonons in silk or in synthetic polymers designed on silk structure offers an "exciting new paradigm" for research, said Benjamin Eggleton at the University of Sydney. Professor Eggleton, not connected with the research, is director of the Institute of Photonics and Optical Science at the university.
His team at the university's new $150 million Nanoscience Hub is looking at manipulating photons to achieve real world outcomes in medicine and telecommunications.
But he says that how sound energy - the phonons - interact with the photons is critical in their work.
"There's no reason that we couldn't look at incorporating silk into the lab-on-a-chip technology we are developing. Nature is providing exquisite material for us to work with," Professor Eggleton said.
He said that phonons, the packets of sound energy, could be used to help control the fluid dynamics on the nano-engineered lab-on-a-chip. The aim of such technology is to assist point-of-care management of diseases such as diabetes.
Silk, he said, has a wide range of benefits. It is biodegradable and biocompatible. It can be implanted in the body and left with no immunology concerns.
Professor Eggleton refers to a recent Ted talk by Fiorenzo Omenetto, who points out that silk can be used in microelectronics, optical fibres, creating holograms, biodegradable materials, microneedle arrays or used to build vein replacements.
"Phonons are very important and help us understand how we can manipulate heat.
"It could even help us develop more efficient solar cells," he said.
Sean Blamires at the University of NSW studies spider silk. He said that the Rice University study argues that better understanding "silk structural organisation will play a major role in achieving the dream of producing synthetic, tunable silks".
However he warns that studying just the nanoscale structure of the silk might not tell us enough. "The spinning production processes of spider silk seems to be a much larger obstacle" in achieving synthetic silks, he said.
In Texas, Professor Thomas said: "Right now, we don't know how to do any [phononic manipulation] in other materials. There's been investigation into synthetic polymers, such as nylon, but nobody's ever found a band gap."
It seems that silk still is the most ancient of materials for the future.
