Shortly after the Preston Innovation Lab was set up at Rice University, graduate student Faye Yap was rearranging a few things when she noticed a dead curled-up spider in the hallway. Curious ...

But instead of a classic metal claw, they used something much spookier: a spider corpse. When spiders die, their muscles tense up. "So when the spider is alive, it can actively control the valves ...

That didn’t work. But when the researchers injected fluid straight into a spider corpse, they found that they could control its grip well enough to pull wires from a circuit board and pick up ...

The dead spiders could pick up more than 130 percent of their own body weight and last through 1,000 open-close cycles, per the paper. Without any kind of coating on the corpse, the spiders only ...

But the would-be corpse began twitching, and then the researchers noticed a second, smaller spider about an inch above the decoy, shaking her web. The researchers said it “blew their minds.” ...