Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: do you remember the myth of a ratney? Oh? Yes,
Speaker 1: I do. It's a great one, right, because it follows
Speaker 1: a familiar pattern. Right. You begin with a particularly skilled human, right,
Speaker 1: a great mortal that has just a wondrous talent at
Speaker 1: her disposal. A rackney. She's just a wonderful Weaver's an
Speaker 1: expert weaver, just creates these beautiful tapestries, right, puffed up
Speaker 1: with pride, I bet, But of course, yeah, In fact,
Speaker 1: she ends up boasting of her skills, and either, depending
Speaker 1: on what account you're looking at, either she actually challenges Athena,
Speaker 1: the Goddess of Wisdom and Crafts, to a weaving competition,
Speaker 1: or she just kind of talks about how great she
Speaker 1: is and how she's better than Athena until Athena steps
Speaker 1: up and uh, you know, and and accepts this challenge.
Speaker 1: And of course this is a terrible idea. Right, You're
Speaker 1: going up against a god who basically like pick axed
Speaker 1: her way out of Zeus's brain, Right, Yeah, and like
Speaker 1: all the Greek gods are are are basically terrible. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're they're vain, they're petty, they're powerful, and uh, and
Speaker 1: yet she ends up in this competition and then it
Speaker 1: just gets it gets even worse from there. Um in
Speaker 1: Ovid's telling, Athena's resulting tapestry illustrates past incidents where the
Speaker 1: gods punished more mortals for their arrogance and uh. And
Speaker 1: then Arachne responds by weaving in accounts of just how
Speaker 1: massively abusive and just what kind of misleading jerks the
Speaker 1: gods are towards humans. So, depending on which account you
Speaker 1: look at, either Athena wins because she is a god
Speaker 1: and no matter how great your mortal skill, you're gonna
Speaker 1: get trump by a god. Or Athena notices that arachney
Speaker 1: skill is actually superior to hers, and out of spite
Speaker 1: she just kind of rage quits the entire competition. And
Speaker 1: in either case she curses Athena and her descendants for
Speaker 1: forever turning them into these minuscule web slinging arachnids that
Speaker 1: we know and love today. And what is interesting about
Speaker 1: that is that in some ways humans are still trying
Speaker 1: to extend out this metaphor of trying to manipulate nature
Speaker 1: for their own gain or go up against it. So
Speaker 1: here's one from way back, and then we'll talk more
Speaker 1: recently how we have been trying to do this, all right,
Speaker 1: So we have one Francois xavier A ban Sae Hilaire,
Speaker 1: who it turns out, took silk and he tried to
Speaker 1: do what the gods what nature did, and he tried
Speaker 1: to extract it and weave it. And in fact he
Speaker 1: took the silk he boiled their cocoons, extracting the threads
Speaker 1: with combs to make socks and gloves. And then in
Speaker 1: the early nineteenth century along came Jesuit priest Ramondo Maria Tremor,
Speaker 1: who discovered that threads extracted from the spider itself produced
Speaker 1: a higher quality silk. And there's an eighteen oh seven
Speaker 1: engraving showing his extraction device, and we're looking at it
Speaker 1: right now. Uh, it kind of looks like a spider guillotine. Yes,
Speaker 1: it looks a little nefarious, like I'm instantly sympathizing with
Speaker 1: the spider here, Yeah, because you see that its head
Speaker 1: is trapped in there in this little half moon device.
Speaker 1: It's tiny, and it's abdomen is hanging out, and there's
Speaker 1: a winding machine drawing out a continuous strand from it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which instantly makes me think of the paintings of the
Speaker 1: windlass of the Rasmus. The spindle that was used to
Speaker 1: draw Rasmus is guts out of his body. So it
Speaker 1: looks very much like a torture instrument. Yes, true, right
Speaker 1: is very nefarious looking, but it's illustrative of the fact
Speaker 1: that even with this tiny device, it's incredibly labor intensive.
Speaker 1: And while we now have the technology to make this
Speaker 1: an easier process, and we have synthetic materials that try
Speaker 1: to mimic silk, we humans are still laboring, still pulling
Speaker 1: at the strings of silk. But now it's not in
Speaker 1: service of our sartorial desires. It's in service of what
Speaker 1: we might think of ours, our scientific desires. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: still a ragney, she doesn't give up her secrets easily.
Speaker 1: She does not. So in this episode, we're going to
Speaker 1: talk a bit about what silk is, what spider silk
Speaker 1: in particular is, and why it's such a stellar um
Speaker 1: engineering feat, and then we're going to talk about the
Speaker 1: various ways that that that humans continue to try and
Speaker 1: grasp that secret of the silk from the spiders, how
Speaker 1: to how we try to mimic it and all the
Speaker 1: various uses that we have for it in our modern
Speaker 1: scientific world. That's right. And it's not just spiders. The
Speaker 1: silkworms so of course, are a huge fixture in this.
Speaker 1: That's right because we uh start off by just talking
Speaker 1: about what silk is, and in defining silk, we really
Speaker 1: need to start more on the insects side of things,
Speaker 1: uh than the arachnet. For the most part, silk is
Speaker 1: a fine, continuous protein fiber produced by various insect larva
Speaker 1: for cocoons, uh. And it's really only produced by a
Speaker 1: few groups in the insect world. And we also refer
Speaker 1: to silk as a bio polymer now. In insects, silk
Speaker 1: originates as a stored protein liquid and modified saliva glands
Speaker 1: located in the insect's head. From here it transports via
Speaker 1: small tubes to the spinneret structure that protrudes beneath the
Speaker 1: mouth parts on the underside of the head of a
Speaker 1: given insect. In the case of spiders, however, as we'll discuss,
Speaker 1: the spinneret is backloaded on the end of the abdomen
Speaker 1: instead uh And we'll get to the spiders in a bit.
Speaker 1: But as far as the insects go, the most common
Speaker 1: use again is cocooning. That's to contain and protect a
Speaker 1: defenseless pupil stage of the insect or and or to
Speaker 1: hold it in place on a leaf or a stem,
Speaker 1: and also some months build tints out of the material
Speaker 1: as well. Cocoon is spun from a single thread of silk.
Speaker 1: It might be just pure silk depending on the species,
Speaker 1: or it might involve bits of soil or leaf litter
Speaker 1: uh that are caught up in the silk strand as well.
Speaker 1: So let's look a little closer at the silkworm, which
Speaker 1: is the larva or caterpillar of the domesticated silk moth
Speaker 1: called bombyx mori, which is Latin for silkworm of the
Speaker 1: mulberry tree. In fact, there's a Chinese proverb that says,
Speaker 1: with time and patients, the mulberry leaf becomes a silk gown. Now,
Speaker 1: the silkworm was once native to China, but now is
Speaker 1: completely domesticated. One cocoon consists of a single thread that
Speaker 1: is about one thousand to three thousand feet long, that's
Speaker 1: three nine hundred meters. And the manipulation of silkworm, the
Speaker 1: domestication goes back years. And there's a legend that Lei Zu,
Speaker 1: wife of the Yellow Emperor, was drinking tea when a
Speaker 1: cocoon fell from a mulberry tree into her steaming cup
Speaker 1: of tea and began to unravel. Yes, she was amazed
Speaker 1: by its luminosity and strength, and she gathered more and
Speaker 1: made silk, and China began to export silk and two
Speaker 1: hundred b c e so much so that the Silk Road,
Speaker 1: the famous network of trade routes, was created and stretched
Speaker 1: from China to the Mediterranean, Africa and Middle East in Europe.
Speaker 1: And the origin of silk was really closely guarded, right
Speaker 1: because this is the this is the lifeblood of China
Speaker 1: at the time. But in five and fifty se some
Speaker 1: some wily sly monks who had traveled to China brought
Speaker 1: back silkworm eggs, and the end of the West was
Speaker 1: forever changed with silk at its disposal. Indeed, now it's
Speaker 1: rate as insects. Silk is as great as the silkworm.
Speaker 1: Silk is. None of these guys can really match the
Speaker 1: arachnids in terms of just pure engineering genius of the thread. Um.
Speaker 1: I mean, they're just in a class all their own.
Speaker 1: So the thing about the spiders, as we've alluded to,
Speaker 1: is that scientists are continuing to study spider silk making
Speaker 1: and UH and trying to get all the valuable details
Speaker 1: out of it. And we still have a lot of
Speaker 1: questions regarding exactly how it all comes together. UM. But
Speaker 1: here the basics as we understand it. Spiders, like the
Speaker 1: like insects, um like the silkworms, have a special special
Speaker 1: glands to secrete silk proteins dissolved in a water based solution.
Speaker 1: The spider pushes the liquid solution through long ducts, leading
Speaker 1: to microscopic UH bigots on the spiders spinnerets, and generally
Speaker 1: there are two or three spinneret pairs located in the
Speaker 1: rear of the admin. Furthermore, each spigot has a valve
Speaker 1: that controls the thickness and speed of the extruded material.
Speaker 1: So already we're seeing like these different layers of complexity
Speaker 1: that are in play when it comes to just pushing
Speaker 1: out that that layer of silk. I think it's easy
Speaker 1: to fall into the trap of thinking of spider silk
Speaker 1: as kind of like silly string, right, Like there's just
Speaker 1: a gland, they squeeze it out, and they just squeeze
Speaker 1: out this thread, and yes, there's some sort of a
Speaker 1: you know, a hardening of the liquid as it comes out,
Speaker 1: but we think, well, there's nothing more to that. But
Speaker 1: really we're talking about a really intense engineering feet just
Speaker 1: at the the construction of the material itself. As the
Speaker 1: spigots pull these silk molecules out of the ducks and
Speaker 1: excrewed them and extrude them into the air, the molecules
Speaker 1: are stretched out and linked together to form long strands,
Speaker 1: and then the spinnerettes wind the strands together to form
Speaker 1: the sturdy silk fiber itself. And this is where it
Speaker 1: gets even crazier, because most spiders have multiple silk glands
Speaker 1: in their body, which secrete different types of silk material
Speaker 1: optimized for different purposes. By winding different silk varieties together
Speaker 1: in varying proportions, uh, spiders can form a wide range
Speaker 1: of fiber material. So it's not just one type of
Speaker 1: ciders a spider silk that's coming out. There are varying
Speaker 1: spider silks depending on what their purposes. They can vary
Speaker 1: fiber consistency by adjusting the spigots from smaller to larger strands,
Speaker 1: and sometimes they'll create a silk strand consisting of an
Speaker 1: inner core with an outer tube around it. Uh, And
Speaker 1: they might apply various coatings such as a waterproof coating
Speaker 1: or a sticky layer, depending on what the use is.
Speaker 1: So so again, when it comes to spider silk, when
Speaker 1: they're creating it, that the purpose of the silk is
Speaker 1: reflected in the actual construction of the silk thread itself,
Speaker 1: which is amazing, especially if you bump this up against
Speaker 1: the silkworm and nothing against the silkworm. They're doing a
Speaker 1: pretty cool job there with making their cocoon, right, But
Speaker 1: that's sort of like, here's this one thing I can do,
Speaker 1: whereas a spider is more like its own three D
Speaker 1: printer exactly. I think that's a fabulous comparison. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's varying the type of product that it's creating. And
Speaker 1: the best way to really examine this is to look
Speaker 1: at the anatomy of a web, because I remember, above
Speaker 1: all else, spiders are predators, and so they've come up
Speaker 1: with this elaborate way to catch their dinners. Now, they
Speaker 1: will initially just cast a silk line out into the wind,
Speaker 1: and when it senses that it's caught upon something, it
Speaker 1: will cinch a starting point and use that connection as
Speaker 1: a bridge, walking across it as it creates a loose
Speaker 1: silk hanging from the starting and ending points of this
Speaker 1: bridge is created, so at that point it pulls pulls
Speaker 1: down the silk time. It creates a kind of y configuration.
Speaker 1: It then creates anchor points and structural threads, laying out
Speaker 1: radius points from the center of the web of the threads.
Speaker 1: So then you have the various different types of thread
Speaker 1: being spun. Here, you have a non stick auxiliary spiral
Speaker 1: that's created as well as a second stick auxiliary one,
Speaker 1: so the spider has its own smooth path to tread
Speaker 1: upon while ensuring that the web is good and sticky elsewhere.
Speaker 1: And there are various I mean, there are tons of
Speaker 1: different types of webs and dizzying and their complexity. Right,
Speaker 1: they're beautiful to look at. But one that I wanted
Speaker 1: to point out is not even functioning as a true web,
Speaker 1: and this is via trapdoor spiders who use their webs
Speaker 1: in a really ingenious way. First they dig a tunnel,
Speaker 1: which they smooth out with a mixture of saliva and earth.
Speaker 1: Then they fit the opening to the tunnel with a
Speaker 1: trap door, and it's made out of spider silk, and
Speaker 1: it can be fitted exactly to the dimensions with a
Speaker 1: beveled edge like that's craftsmanship, or it can just have
Speaker 1: a sheet of silk and dirt, and then the top
Speaker 1: of the trapdoors tricked out with debris so that it
Speaker 1: easily blends in. So this tunnel gives the spider refuge.
Speaker 1: It also gives them a place to raise their young
Speaker 1: end and also in the background, serves as this device
Speaker 1: to let the spider know that, you know, there's prey around.
Speaker 1: And it does this that trapdoor by vibrating, and once
Speaker 1: the spider detects that, it can easily rush out, pull
Speaker 1: in that prey into its hole and then chomp on it.
Speaker 1: And it's kind of we were talking about it earlier.
Speaker 1: I was like, Hey, I'm a little bit I kind
Speaker 1: of don't want to necessarily put this upon the spiders
Speaker 1: trapped or spider, but it feels a little bit serial
Speaker 1: killer to me. Yeah, I mean that that's kind of
Speaker 1: the vibe of the spider right now. As you mentioned,
Speaker 1: their various uses for the silk material, various structures that
Speaker 1: are created by the spiders, and we discussed some of
Speaker 1: those in our episode It's a Trap, which will include
Speaker 1: a link to on the landing page for this episode.
Speaker 1: But these structures are amazing, and the level of engineering
Speaker 1: is is evident not only in the structure of the
Speaker 1: that they create out of the webbing, it again in
Speaker 1: the uh, the minute structure of the strands themselves. Uh.
Speaker 1: Spider silk is is is particularly great engineering substance because
Speaker 1: it's incredibly strong, but it's also incredibly flexible. Uh. There's
Speaker 1: some varieties that are reportedly five times as strong as
Speaker 1: an equal mass of steel and twice as strong as
Speaker 1: an equal mass of kevlar. So again, it rivals some
Speaker 1: of our key tough materials that we as humans wield
Speaker 1: in the world around us. Now, to understand, you know,
Speaker 1: why it's so strong, we have to look at the
Speaker 1: molecular construction of spider silk itself. According to a two
Speaker 1: thousand eight study from M I. T. The strength lies
Speaker 1: in the specific geometric configuration of structural proteins, which have
Speaker 1: small clusters of weak hydrogen bonds that work cooperatively to
Speaker 1: resist force and dissipate energy. Two twelve University of California
Speaker 1: Riverside study identified the genes and determine the DNA sequence
Speaker 1: for two key proteins in the drag line silk of
Speaker 1: the black widow spider. And and you often see the
Speaker 1: drag line silk is a focused point UH in the
Speaker 1: various studies because of the services the bridge, it has
Speaker 1: to be really strong. So this is the primo material
Speaker 1: when it comes to spider silk UH. And it turns
Speaker 1: out the straight drag line silk is a composite material
Speaker 1: comprised of two different proteins, each containing three regions with
Speaker 1: distinct properties. So you have an amorphous non crystalline matrix
Speaker 1: that's stretchable, giving the silk elasticity. And then embedded in
Speaker 1: the amorphous portions of both proteins are two kinds of
Speaker 1: crystalline regions that toughen the silk. So the resulting composite
Speaker 1: is strong, tough, yet elastic. And and again it's it's
Speaker 1: there and just the minute construction of the thread itself,
Speaker 1: and we humans see it, we admire it, and we
Speaker 1: want it. But commercial production of spider silk from spiders
Speaker 1: is impractical because spiders are jerks right there. They're to
Speaker 1: cannibalistic and territorial for farming. They're not really jerks, but
Speaker 1: you know, they're just not ideal for that purpose. Uh
Speaker 1: And researchers have looked to other organisms, including bacteria, insects, mammals,
Speaker 1: and plants, But those proteins require mechanical spinning and this
Speaker 1: is a task that our friend the silkworm performs naturally
Speaker 1: with those nifty spinneretts. So so what's the researcher to do. Well,
Speaker 1: let's look at Malcolm Fraser Jr. Who in two thousand
Speaker 1: and twelve with his team created a hybrid silkworm to
Speaker 1: do their bidding, one with both silkworm and spider silk proteins,
Speaker 1: and results showed that taking these two proteins um would
Speaker 1: result any tougher than typical silkworm silk. It would be
Speaker 1: as tough as drag line silk um and it would
Speaker 1: be just the right material that you would want to
Speaker 1: try to commercially produce. So why would you do this?
Speaker 1: Why would you mercially produce it um? We'll discuss other
Speaker 1: instances in which you can use it. But when they
Speaker 1: were looking at for this purpose, it was for wound dressings,
Speaker 1: artificial ligments, tendons, tissue scaffolds, micro capsules, cosmetics, and textiles. Okay, Now,
Speaker 1: while some of you have probably heard of these transgenic
Speaker 1: silk worms, I bet even more of you remember the
Speaker 1: transgenic spider goat hybrid, because this really made the rounds,
Speaker 1: especially back in two thousand two. Uh, instantly bringing to
Speaker 1: mind and uh and probably to digital reality. Poorly photoshopped
Speaker 1: images of a goat with like big spider legs coming
Speaker 1: out of its side, right, was photoshopped? Yeah, because because
Speaker 1: the real transgenic goat spider hybrid just looks like a goat. Um.
Speaker 1: This again, it's happening back in two thousand two, researchers
Speaker 1: at Nexia Biotechnologies genetically modified goats using silk producing genes
Speaker 1: from spiders, which just a headline level back in two
Speaker 1: thousand two, it of course instantly sounds Frankensteiny, right, like
Speaker 1: who are these scientists and why are they trying to
Speaker 1: make goat spiders? Um. But at this point in the podcast,
Speaker 1: I think everyone understands what they were going for the
Speaker 1: idea was that you would have a small number of
Speaker 1: goats that would be able to produce a large amount
Speaker 1: of silk material in their milk, which could then be
Speaker 1: used in various UH then could be utilized for various
Speaker 1: purposes as we'll discuss. Essentially, they would be the goats
Speaker 1: will be creating dragline milk. Now, the strands that they
Speaker 1: produced were only as strong as natural spider silk, but
Speaker 1: still it's a start, right UH and and at their
Speaker 1: height next to as Montreal Flock had nearly fifty spider
Speaker 1: goats total. But the company went bankrupt in two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: So you had a couple of transgendent goats that went
Speaker 1: to the Canadian Agricultural Museum, while the rest of them
Speaker 1: went to Utah State University where they're continue to study
Speaker 1: them to this day and figure out how we can
Speaker 1: best utilize a spider goat UM for the for the
Speaker 1: better men of humanity. Now, that's not the only instance
Speaker 1: of a company either going bankrupt or just pulling out
Speaker 1: of the endeavor entirely. And that is because even though
Speaker 1: you you have UM information being uncovered and you have
Speaker 1: the transgenic UH, the ability to mess around with this
Speaker 1: and try to do this in other organisms you still
Speaker 1: have to understand the relationship between spider silk structure and
Speaker 1: its function. And again a lot of companies have tried
Speaker 1: to do this, but it wasn't until researchers from Dalhousie
Speaker 1: University in Nova Scotia took a closer look at the
Speaker 1: mechanism and tried to uncover some piece of information that
Speaker 1: might get them a little bit closer. Now, the first
Speaker 1: step is that they created artificial spider silk to replicate
Speaker 1: the proteins that make up the natural version, in this
Speaker 1: case by recombinantly expressing them in the Bacterium E coli. Now,
Speaker 1: they looked at the key protein and acid informed silk
Speaker 1: called a c sp one and they said, okay, it's
Speaker 1: got three parts. And they said, all right. The protein,
Speaker 1: most of it is repeated sequences of about two hundred
Speaker 1: amino acids, and there are two tales called the N
Speaker 1: and C terminal domains that hang off each end of
Speaker 1: the protein chain. Now, when they took these proteins and
Speaker 1: they chained them together, they found that the chains weren't
Speaker 1: working in unison, but rather as independent units. So that
Speaker 1: was the first clue of how these are actually working
Speaker 1: within spiders. And it was the C terminal domain of
Speaker 1: the protein that was the juncture of the protein that
Speaker 1: determined the strength of the fiber. So when you're talking
Speaker 1: about that spider being in the architect and choosing a
Speaker 1: different type of that type of material, but maybe um
Speaker 1: consistency or strength, that's the C terminal that is controlling that.
Speaker 1: And this was a huge breakthrough, right because it peeled
Speaker 1: away a layer of mystery, and yet there's still so
Speaker 1: much to be learned in the evolution of spider silk. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because then we what do you do with that data?
Speaker 1: Then it just leads to six other questions regarding the
Speaker 1: engineering process that's taking place there. I guess what you
Speaker 1: knew is you look at it in its in its
Speaker 1: form right now and say, oh, what can we deal
Speaker 1: with it? Right? And that's really the the examples we're
Speaker 1: gonna look to next in the podcast are really looking
Speaker 1: more at at possible uh ways that we can use
Speaker 1: the spider silk and the structure of the spider silk
Speaker 1: and in some cases of the structure of the web itself,
Speaker 1: how we can mimic that design in various pursuits. According
Speaker 1: to a two thousand fourteen paper from the University of
Speaker 1: Akron UH spider silk could be used as an inspiration
Speaker 1: to create more efficient and stronger commercial and biomedical adhesives
Speaker 1: that could, for example, potentially attach tendons to bones, bind fractures, etcetera.
Speaker 1: Anytime you need to bring to shoot together and hold
Speaker 1: it in place firmly. And and of course one of
Speaker 1: the advantages here is we'd be using a biosubstance as
Speaker 1: opposed to something that has to be ejected from the
Speaker 1: body or taken out at a later date. UH. In particular,
Speaker 1: with this particular with this study, UH, they were looking
Speaker 1: at the attachment disks that spiders used to attach their
Speaker 1: webs to structure. So the spider pins down an underlying
Speaker 1: thread of silk with additional threads like stitches or staples
Speaker 1: on top of it. UM. But the real engineering feed
Speaker 1: here is that the geometry of the attachment disk, the
Speaker 1: way that they're actually laying down these strands, it creates
Speaker 1: a super strong attachment force using very little material. So
Speaker 1: it's you know, a perfect economic model to try and
Speaker 1: and mimic. So this this particular team led by you
Speaker 1: a professor of polymer science, Ali Dinawala, utilized electro spinning
Speaker 1: to mimic the efficient staple pin method. Now, electro spinning
Speaker 1: is a process by which an electrical charge is used
Speaker 1: to draw very fine fibers from a liquid. And in
Speaker 1: the case of this, uh, this particular experiment, they were
Speaker 1: using polyure thing. Okay, So again, the possible uses here
Speaker 1: include you know binding, uh, you know, tendons back together, binding,
Speaker 1: tends to bone, binding, fractures, etcetera. And you'd be using
Speaker 1: material that can degrade and be reabsorbed by the body.
Speaker 1: Now that's an example of mending the human body. But
Speaker 1: spider silk also shows up when you're talking about essentially
Speaker 1: growing new organs for yourself. And that's because you need
Speaker 1: when you're talking about growing artificial tissues and organs, you
Speaker 1: need some kind of structure or substrate for the entity
Speaker 1: to grow around. And so what could be feather light
Speaker 1: but formidable enough to provide a framework spiderwebs, of course.
Speaker 1: So you have a group of researchers led by Professor
Speaker 1: Constantine A. Glad Say, who heads the Laboratory of Biophysics
Speaker 1: of Excitable Systems m I p T, and they work
Speaker 1: specifically on cardiac tissues. Isolate, a protein used in web
Speaker 1: spinning called spiedroying. What they did is they seated isolated
Speaker 1: neonatal rat cardiac cells on fiber matrices and during the experiment,
Speaker 1: the researchers monitored the growth of the cells and they
Speaker 1: tested their contractability right in their ability to conduct electrical impulses,
Speaker 1: and these are the main features of normal cardiac tissue.
Speaker 1: They wanted to see if that could be mimicked in
Speaker 1: in the protein. And the monitoring, which was carried out
Speaker 1: with the help of a microscope and fluorescent markers, showed
Speaker 1: that within three to five days a layer of cells
Speaker 1: formed on the substrate that we're able to contract synchronously
Speaker 1: and conduct electrical impulses, just like the tissue of a
Speaker 1: living heartwood. And this is pretty big news, right. It
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that we're around the corner from grow your
Speaker 1: replacement heart clinics um, but it does mean that it's
Speaker 1: it's a serious step toward me a beating heart out
Speaker 1: of a few cells, Like that's going to become an
Speaker 1: eventual reality. And now you found the material. That's just
Speaker 1: one more in the link to it. It's sounding more
Speaker 1: and more like the bodies of the future will just
Speaker 1: be riddled with spider self and I have another example
Speaker 1: of it here. Uh. I mean, this one really kind
Speaker 1: of blew me away because the example, if we looked
Speaker 1: at so far that they're they're based in structure, right,
Speaker 1: We're looking at the structure of the webbing and how
Speaker 1: it can be used to make attachments, to to create
Speaker 1: a structure, to grow tissue over, etcetera. But there were
Speaker 1: a couple of studies that came out in a two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve edition of Researchers at Frontiers and Optics, a
Speaker 1: scientific journal. UH looked at two independent teams, one at
Speaker 1: TUF University in Boston at one at c n R.
Speaker 1: S Institute of Physics in France. UH, and they were
Speaker 1: looking at ways that this natural spider silk could be
Speaker 1: used as an eco friendly alternative two traditional methods of
Speaker 1: manipulating light. So we're talking about, um, an alternative to
Speaker 1: glass or plastic fiber optics and lenses. UM. Why would
Speaker 1: you want this again? It comes back to biomedical technology, right,
Speaker 1: the placement of sensors and tags or any kind of
Speaker 1: utilized utilization of light within the human body. UM. I
Speaker 1: mean the revelation for me here that I just did
Speaker 1: not realize was that as it turns out, in addition
Speaker 1: to being super sturdy and flexible, silk is a gifted
Speaker 1: light manipulator, and so so light could travel through silk
Speaker 1: almost as easily as it flows through through glass fibers.
Speaker 1: So the potential here hits two key areas. One implanable
Speaker 1: biodegradable optics utilized in sensors and tags that are placed
Speaker 1: inside the body. We've talked about the the importance of
Speaker 1: real time monitoring um of of our of our body
Speaker 1: and how that is that can play into better management
Speaker 1: of our overall health. And another area is that you
Speaker 1: can take this on biosensors. You can take a pristine
Speaker 1: fiber of spider silk and carry light into the body
Speaker 1: through a very small opening um which would be quite
Speaker 1: useful for internal imaging or even chemical diagnosis using spectroscopy,
Speaker 1: which is the analysis of matter based on its interaction
Speaker 1: with light. So yeah, just it's amazing to think of this,
Speaker 1: like this tiny little thread of of of spider silk
Speaker 1: going in through a tiny hole in the body and
Speaker 1: aiding in the in diagnosis. That really, to me is like,
Speaker 1: I think, a game changer and amazing to me that
Speaker 1: the material is being used that way. Yeah, it just again,
Speaker 1: it just it just drives home just how impressive this
Speaker 1: material is. Yeah, and again, just to underscore that uh
Speaker 1: impressive durability and strength, let's go back to the spider's
Speaker 1: drag line again. It is the stuff of engineer's streams,
Speaker 1: the tensile strength of a high grade alloy steel, while
Speaker 1: being a sixth as dense and incredibly flexible. You can
Speaker 1: draw it out about five times at some length without
Speaker 1: compromising it. So how do you get a spider to
Speaker 1: do better? How do you ask it to just up
Speaker 1: its game of kevlar strength? Okay, we're still trying to
Speaker 1: actually steal its secrets, but then we're also saying what
Speaker 1: can we do to bump it up? Yeah, we're saying, hey,
Speaker 1: we know you've perfected this over four hundred million years
Speaker 1: of evolution, but do you think right now you could
Speaker 1: do something to increase the durability. Well, of course we're
Speaker 1: talking about here is some researchers. In this case, we're
Speaker 1: talking about Nicola Puno at the University of Trento in
Speaker 1: Italy and his team who took some seller spiders who
Speaker 1: are also known as fulsit I and the site spider
Speaker 1: Hugger dot com by the way, describes these spiders as
Speaker 1: quote looking like something made out of many marshmallows of
Speaker 1: pipe cleaners. So the research took these seller spiders and
Speaker 1: they douse the spiders with either water containing carbon nanotubes
Speaker 1: or graphine flakes. Now two materials that are both really
Speaker 1: really strong, right, So this is an attempt to sort
Speaker 1: of to supersize the strength of the of the spider
Speaker 1: and sort of make it into it's a little spider superhero.
Speaker 1: They checked out the spider's handiwork after they did this
Speaker 1: for each strand of silk, and they fixed the fiber
Speaker 1: between two C shaped cardboard holders and placed it in
Speaker 1: a device that can measure the load on a fiber
Speaker 1: with a resolution of fifteen nanomutants in any fiber displacement
Speaker 1: with a resolution of a point one nanometers. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: in other words, are very serious about the tin sile
Speaker 1: strength here, and Pina wrote that the thread is the
Speaker 1: highest toughness modulus for a fiber, surpassing synthetic polymeric high
Speaker 1: performance fibers like Kevlar forty nine and even the current
Speaker 1: toughest knotted fibers. So it was amazing about that is
Speaker 1: not only it was the thread tougher than before, right,
Speaker 1: tougher than kevlar, tougher than its own natural tensile strength.
Speaker 1: But they could find the actual carbon nanitubes in it.
Speaker 1: They just weren't sure of how it was happening. At first.
Speaker 1: They thought, well, maybe they were taking it and spreading
Speaker 1: it onto the spider silk after it came out of them,
Speaker 1: but that was discounted. They're just not sure how it
Speaker 1: was incorporated into their bodies to create it. So again
Speaker 1: we find out a little more about the mystery of
Speaker 1: spider silk, and we just end up with more questions.
Speaker 1: It is the great mystery. Well you know, um, we
Speaker 1: have one more study to to mention here, and and
Speaker 1: this one we feel really really drives home the elegance
Speaker 1: of the design that we see here again not only
Speaker 1: in the structure that they build, but the but the
Speaker 1: material that they build in the varying take some material
Speaker 1: they build to construct it. The comparison here spy eighter
Speaker 1: silk and music spidered web and U and you know,
Speaker 1: a classically arranged piece of music. Um. In particularly, we're
Speaker 1: looking at a study from two thousand eleven researches at M. I. T.
Speaker 1: They created a scientifically rigorous analogy that shows the similarities
Speaker 1: between the physical structure structure of spider silk and the
Speaker 1: sonic structure of a melody. Um and taking it down,
Speaker 1: just stripping it down to the building blocks of either
Speaker 1: an amino acid in the case of the webbing, and
Speaker 1: a sound wave in the case of the music. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's got many different layers of sound in music
Speaker 1: to it in this analogy, and the study explains that
Speaker 1: structural patterns are directly related to the functional properties. That's
Speaker 1: one layer of lightweight strength in the spider silk and
Speaker 1: in the riff sonic tension that creates an emotional response
Speaker 1: in the listener. It's interesting to think of actually melody
Speaker 1: music is spider webs, right, and the tension that's held
Speaker 1: within them and the structures, the repeating patterns. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: just again it drives home just the elegance of the
Speaker 1: design and just how how nuanced it is. Um. I
Speaker 1: don't know if I'm going to start thinking of music
Speaker 1: I like as a spider web exactly, but but but
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a wonderful analogy that they make and
Speaker 1: back up with data. Yeah, it's another way to look
Speaker 1: at um, not Fibonacci, but symmetry and nature and the
Speaker 1: patterns held within and only that uh, the communication, right,
Speaker 1: because if you think about the spider web and the
Speaker 1: vibrations that it's giving off, that perhaps is a kind
Speaker 1: of melody to the spider itself telling it something about
Speaker 1: the pacing, something about the beat of the thing that's
Speaker 1: making it vibrate. Yeah, the sweet sweet music of of
Speaker 1: of a creature in agony wrapped up in your web
Speaker 1: that you could take. I'll go and uh and wrap
Speaker 1: up some more and drain the life force from that exactly.
Speaker 1: That's the song of the spider right there, all right.
Speaker 1: So there you have it, uh, spider silk. I hope
Speaker 1: that uh, I hope that that that you guys and
Speaker 1: guys listening have more respect now for the spider and
Speaker 1: what it's doing. It's not just a silly string coming
Speaker 1: out of a spiders but it's uh, and it's not
Speaker 1: you know, spiderweb itself is not on par with just
Speaker 1: you know, doing some cat's cradle stuff with some string
Speaker 1: and your fingers. That it's an engineering marvel at every level.
Speaker 1: If you would like to learn more about this topic
Speaker 1: and others, that'll be sure to head on over stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot com. There's where you'll find
Speaker 1: uh podcast videos, blog post links out of social media accounts,
Speaker 1: and we'll make sure that we have stuff on the
Speaker 1: landing page linking out to some wonderful resources, including the
Speaker 1: how spiders Work article on how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: which gives you a wonderful overview of spider anatomy. If
Speaker 1: you have thoughts about the culture or residents of silkworms
Speaker 1: in China, or if you have thoughts about spider webs
Speaker 1: and silk used in biomedicine, particularly in your own body,
Speaker 1: or even what we're talking about with melodies and the
Speaker 1: patterns of spider webs, please do share those thoughts with us.
Speaker 1: We'd love to hear from you, and you can email
Speaker 1: us at blow the Mind House to works dot com
Speaker 1: for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
Speaker 1: it how staff works dot com