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Spiders, as we all know, are terrifying little jerks who won't tell us the secret to their super strong webs.

Well the joke is on you, spiders, because a group of researchers from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and the Karolinska Institutet has figured out how to make artificial spider silk.

The researchers discovered that there's a certain acidity in a spider's silk gland, where webs are stored as a protein before being converted into a fiber. They developed a way to replicate the silk gland, leading to them being able to make a kilometers-worth of artificial spider's web.

You can read their full scientific explanation here.

Apart from being ridiculously strong -- more durable than steel, even -- spider silk has impressive medical utility. It can help regenerate skin following a burn or cut, for instance, and some researchers think it can even replace ligaments.

Despite its usefulness, spider silk has been difficult to farm, the University said, because the critters are hard to keep captive and don't actually produce that much web.

"This is the first successful example of biomimetic spider silk spinning," claimed Senior Researcher Anna Rising. "In the future this may allow industrial production of artificial silk for biomaterial applications or for the manufacture of advanced textiles."