Scientists create bulletproof skin from spider silk

The delicate fibres that spiders spin have been used to create a material which can repel speeding  bullets. And it's four-times stronger than Kevlar, which is used to manufacture bulletproof jackets.

The artist Jalila Essaidi created the 'skin' used transgenic goats and silkworms to create spider-silk proteins from which the raw material was spun in a synthetic laboratory at Utah State University.

The subsequent modified silk was eventually wedged between human skin cells and incubated for five weeks to produce the incredibly tough spider-skin.

In subsequent experiments, the material resisted bullets fired directly at it at half-speed.

Get the full story as reported by the New Scientist and watch the video.