An accord has been signed by the government representatives, employers and trade unions to form a Social Council for Textile, Leather, Footwear and Rubber Industries. This is the first ever council in Croatia wherein social dialogue will be carried out at industrial level.

The council will include seven representatives each from the Ministry of Economy, Labour and Enterprise, the Associations of the Textile and Leather Industries within Croatian Employers’ Association (HUP) and the trade unions of textile, leather, footwear and rubber industry workers.

Spiders and silkworms are masters of materials science, but scientists are finally catching up. Silks are among the toughest materials known, stronger and less brittle, pound for pound, than steel. Now scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have unraveled some of their deepest secrets in research that could lead the way to the creation of synthetic materials that duplicate, or even exceed, the extraordinary properties of natural silk.

Markus Buehler, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and his team study fundamental properties of materials and how those materials fail. With silk, that meant using computer models that can simulate not just the structures of the molecules but exactly how they move and interact in relation to each other. The models helped the researchers determine the molecular and atomic mechanisms responsible for the material’s remarkable mechanical properties.