"In their latest study in the journal ACS Macro Letters, the team found that instead of being one long strand of protein, the ribbon of silk is composed entirely of 1 micron-long nanostrands stuck together in parallel. Typically, about 2,500 of these mini-strands clung together to form one strand of silk. “We were expecting to find that the fiber was a single mass,” co-author Hannes Schniepp of William & Mary says in a statement. “But what we found was that the silk was actually a kind of tiny cable.”"