Nanoscale Optical Fiber From Spider Silk

Makarand writes "Engineers may soon be able to make the finest optical fibers with some help from spiders. To make optical fibers narrower for nanoscale applications, researchers coated spider silk fibers with glassy material which was later removed by baking. The spider Stegodyphus pacificus, a native of the Middle East and South Asia, spins the thinnest known silk which promises to yield optical fibers with a diameter of around two nanometres!"

Comments

The silk is removed, not the glassy coating

[Simon Field]

The post made it sound like the glassy coating was being removed.

The light then travels in the air filled core, not in the glass.

The use in scanning near-field microscopes is interesting, but don't we already have versions of those that use nono-sized particles that emit light (fluoresce), instead of the types that use fiber optics as the light source?