Opencast mining method is one of the most productive methods available at present, which generally associated with removal and handling a huge amount overburden material. Hence it imposes serious challenge dump slope stability that too, mainly in case internal dumps. The study primarily focused on dragline dumps subsequent development rating system to classify profiles. Initially, numerical sim...

Spider dragline silk is considered to be the toughest biopolymer on Earth due to an extraordinary combination of strength and elasticity. Moreover, silks are biocompatible and biodegradable protein-based materials. Recent advances in genetic engineering make it possible to produce recombinant silks in heterologous hosts, opening up opportunities for large-scale production of recombinant silks f...

Spider dragline silk is a model biological polymer for biomimetic research due to its many desirable and unusual properties. 'Supercontraction' describes the dramatic shrinking of dragline silk fibers when wetted. In restrained silk fibers, supercontraction generates substantial stresses of 40-50 MPa above a critical humidity of approximately 70% relative humidity (RH). This stress may maintain...

Spider dragline silk proteins, spidroins, have a tripartite composition; a nonrepetitive N-terminal domain, a central repetitive region built up from many iterated poly-Ala and Gly rich blocks, and a C-terminal nonrepetitive domain. It is generally believed that the repetitive region forms intermolecular contacts in the silk fibers, while precise functions of the terminal domains have not been ...

Trade-offs among life history traits are central to understanding the limits of adaptations to stress. In animals, virtually all decisions taken during life are expected to have downstream consequences. To what degree rare, but energy-demanding, decisions carry over to individual performance is rarely studied in arthropods. We used spiders as a model system to test how single investments in sil...

The exceptional strength and extensibility of spider dragline silk have been thought to be facilitated by two spidroins, major ampullate spidroin 1 (MaSp1) and major ampullate spidroin 2 (MaSp2), under the assumption that protein secondary structures are coupled with the expressed spidroins. We tested this assumption for the dragline silk of three co-existing Australian spiders, Argiope keyserl...

Spider silk fibers have impressive mechanical properties and are primarily composed of highly repetitive structural proteins (termed spidroins) encoded by a single gene family. Most characterized spidroin genes are incompletely known because of their extreme size (typically >9 kb) and repetitiveness, limiting understanding of the evolutionary processes that gave rise to their unusual gene archi...