Amy Maki, age 10, of Brimson, Minnesota, for her question:

How can a spider get her web across a wide space?

Unless you see her at work, you can never believe how clever she is. To see her you must be an early riser, for the spider spins her web at sunrise. The liquid silk oozes from her tail end and the threads dry in the air. Her back legs guide them as she goes. A spider is born with a built in plan to weave her web across spaces where flies are likely to come flying by. The hard part, you would think, is stretching the crisscrossing threads from one side to the other. She builds these scaffold lines first.

Starting on one side, she runs up the leaves and twigs to the top corner. There she sticks the thread with a gob of glue. Then she lets herself hang, by a growing thread, swinging wider and wider as she goes. When she swings far enough to reach the opposite side, she hangs on and sticks her thread. Then back she swings to string the next, the next and the next thread across the space. Later she weaves a spiraling thread around and around on her crisscrossing scaffold.