Shi En Kim, Contributor (Inside Science) -- Even though he works with spiders regularly, Yao Zhang, a physicist at Jinan University in China, admits he's afraid of them. In fact, most of the people in his lab are, except for graduate student Zhiyong Gong, who keeps spiders as pets in his dorm. Naturally, Gong was the one who volunteered to harvest spider silk in the lab as part of the group's efforts to study how the silk can be used to benefit the human world. "He was the real 'Spider-man'," said Zhang. Whether you're afraid of spiders or not, it's hard not to marvel at the wonders of spider silk. By weight, it's stronger than steel and tougher than Kevlar. It's also exceptionally elastic and can stretch a further one-half its length before it breaks -- that's twice as long as nylon can stretch. Also, spider silk doesn't harm living tissue and breaks down safely inside the body, which has led scientists to investigate the biomedical applications of this extraordinary material.