`Silk screws for pediatric jaw fractures`

There are limits to these materials. This is Ashby's plotting, a linear plot. Here's diamond at the top, here are your metals, here are your ceramics, here are your polymers — your polymers are not very stiff at all. Here are your composites, somewhere in between. However, just because they're not very stiff doesn't mean there aren't times when you'd like to have a lower modulus. Here's a little article from March of this year — Tufts University announces that Professor Kim Thurler has developed silk screws. He has these little silkworms in his lab and they're working day and night to make silk, and he's been trying to get them to make screws — they don't do that for him, they make silk fibers.