Cities of Wood and Bone

We look again at the building materials of the future. Could timber replace concrete? And what about synthetic bone?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking, say there, and welcome to Forward Thinking, the
podcast that looks at the future and says, isn't it good?
Norwegian would? I'm Jonathan Strickland, I'm Lauren Bogbon, and I'm

(00:22):
Joe McCormick. And today, yeah, what what what are we
doing today, Lauren? Today we're talking more about the building
materials of the future. We've threatened to do it, and
now we're making good on that threat. Yes. In April sixteen,
we published an episode called Building Materials of the Future
colin Bio Edition, um and uh yeah, so that we

(00:43):
would return to the topic of construction materials science at
some point, because in that episode we went, okay, we
we a went really deep into the problems with concrete
and cement, which are largely environmental um and and we
also went into a couple of potential alternatives to concrete,
including a materials built by bacteria or fungus, or materials

(01:05):
made in part with hemp or wool or seaweed or
animal blood. Oh yeah, the blood bricks, those are good. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
I'm just thinking about bricks made of wool and Minecraft
right now, it's just it's always but then I have
to be fair. Minecraft is always close at the top
of my mind. Do they have bricks made of blood? No,

(01:25):
but you can't make brakes made out of wool. Did
we have the same conversation last time. I think we did,
and I talked about how in a thunderstorm, if lightning
strikes your wool structure, it will catch on fire and
burned out. But at any rate, one of the things
that drove that discussion was that if you look into
how much it costs US an energy and and in

(01:46):
carbon emissions to make concrete and cement, it is not
a trivial amount. According to the U s Energy Information Administration,
if you choose to believe them, the cement industry accounted
for a quarter of one percent of national energy consumption
in the United States. And and that that sounds like
it's small. You're talking about one quarter of one percent,

(02:07):
but that's total energy consumption, which is a huge number.
So it's a slightly less huge number. Yeah, And to
put it into another perspective that that accounts for like
ten times it's fair share of energy consumption compared to
its its output in terms of gross national goods and

(02:30):
services in the United States. Right, So it's economic value, right,
It's economic value is much lower than the energy value
we're pouring into it compared to other industries. And by
that very nature, that's what got us talking about, well,
why are we still using it and are we looking
into anything else? Well, the reason we're still using it
is that it's it's the it's very useful. It's it's useful,

(02:53):
and there's an established industry, there's an established infrastructure for it.
So you know, there are reasons why we're using it.
But there are a lot of reasons that people are
looking into alternatives because of this energy requirement, the fact
that the carbon emissions are pretty high, and that transporting
this stuff is not cheap either. And so so there

(03:17):
are lots of other materials that we didn't get around
to covering in the last episode, and let's get into
a few of them today. How about would would Well, wait,
we already use wood to build things, but this is
a little bit different, isn't it. We're gonna use more
wood better, future, would better? Better? Better? With more wood? Now,
please timber things. It sounds like I've just had a

(03:39):
complete brain event, but No, seriously, one of the building
materials of the future may very well just be be
would But well, I say, just, but that's not really true.
It's gonna be a new type of wood that goes
through a specific manufacturing process so that it increases its
strength and its resistance to stuff like fire, which is

(04:01):
important and allows it to hold a much heavier load
than say your traditional wooden house. Right, So the way
we use wooden construction today is for small scale construction
a couple of stories. Maybe there's no reason not to
build a wooden house. But once you're talking about high
density occupancy, that's where our big large scale industrial building

(04:26):
materials like steel, concrete, cement, Uh, they sort of take over.
Like when you're we're building tall buildings in an urban environment,
and tall buildings and urban environments is kind of where
we're going with buildings. As we have talked on this
podcast about the floor. Yeah, there's a worldwide urbanization trend.
People are moving into the city's and packing them in right,

(04:47):
and being able to build up helps take care of
this density problem as opposed to sprawling further and further
out from a city center, which can come with a
lot of different problems that we in Atlanta are very wilier.
With all that good infrastructure stuff transport and water and
et cetera, you'll see a lot of other things, uh,

(05:09):
increase in cost because of that. So being able to
build upward has a lot of different benefits. So we're
actually seeing a project. It's a it's a cooperation between
Cambridge University's Department about Architecture and p LP ARCHICHEC Tecture
and engineers Smith and Walwork and they're working on an
eighty story building that would be three or four feet

(05:33):
tall made out of timber. Essentially. That sounds pretty crazy,
it's it's The project is being called the Oakwood Tower.
Um it would be if it was If it goes
on to be to be built, it will be the
second tallest building in London after only the Shard. You know,
I used to live in Oakwood, but that was Oakwood, Georgia.

(05:54):
So you might wonder like, well, why are we even
looking at Wood again, What's what's the big deal? Why
why appear to take a step backward in human architecture.
But actually, as it turns out, Wood has got a
lot of things going for it. For one thing, it's
a renewable resource. That's a big one, right, as long
as you harvest it responsibly. Yeah, and plant more trees

(06:17):
right right, exactly. Yeah, you have to have good stewardship
of forests in order for this to be a truly
renewable resource and not having a net negative impact. But
it would potentially be a much better resource than some
of the other alternatives. Also, if you were to process
the wood properly, you're talking about building material that would

(06:38):
ultimately create a building that could weigh less so it
produces less of a strain on the area around it. Uh,
it would cost less, it would take less time to
build these these structures actually go up pretty fast, um,
and it could be uh more resistant to fire actually,
which is a little weird to think of when you're

(06:59):
talking about we're lying so alright, So the way I've
seen it described is that the way this wood is made,
you get a char that's on the outside of the wood.
But it is very difficult for fire to penetrate further
in than the surface. Given however many layers of would
you have, and the more layers of would you have,

(07:20):
the more time it would take for the fire to
actually penetrate and burn through, right, because we're not talking
about about just a big old block of wood from
a single tree. Obviously, perhaps because if you're talking about
a thousand foot high skyscraper, that's a much larger tree
than I've personally seen. Um but uh but but yeah,
so you're you're talking about wood composed in layers. And

(07:43):
also yeah, like like the natural tendency of a char
on the outside of wood acts as a protective layer
against the stuff further inside. Right, So in these circumstances,
with a large enough item of wood, yeah, you could
also have treated wood as well, which would make it
even more fire resistant. And this is all very important
because so so a lot of this work is being done.

(08:05):
Like we said, in London, let me tell you a
little bit about London wooden buildings and fire. There was
a little event in sixteen sixty six, the Great Fire
of London. London was devastated by this fire. More than
thirteen thousand houses were destroyed, uh somewhere almost like seven

(08:27):
different major churches and landmarks were destroyed. I think I
remember reading Samuel Peep's diary entry about this. Did he
have one? It was it about a different fire? Maybe
I'd have to, I would have to do more research
to tell you that. The fact on that I can
tell you that there were only six recorded deaths. Now,
there were probably a lot more that didn't go recorded,

(08:50):
but there are only six recorded deaths that were connected
to the sixteen sixty six Great Fire of London. There
were a lot of reasons why this fire was able
to rage out of control and caused so much devastation.
A big one was that London at that time had
no official organized fire brigade. It's a huge drawback. Um.
But another big one was that a lot of the

(09:11):
buildings were made out of wood and they were very
close together. If you've ever been through any of the
historic areas of England and you see like the like,
you'll see these super narrow alleyways where buildings will actually
touch above the alley, they'll be in contact with each other.
And that's how London at the time looked, and so

(09:32):
fire could spread very easily from from house to house
because they were pretty much in contact with one another. UM.
So things are different now, obviously, and the actual timber
we're using is different now. Very important when you're talking
about a city that one of its defining historical moments
was a massive fire, and certainly other cities as well

(09:54):
have sure, yeah, Chicago has had a massive one as well.
Planta is a little bit upset about it still, Yeah, Atlanta,
who was a purposefully set fire. But yes, yeah. Another
possible benefit to using wood as opposed to other materials
is really aesthetic. According to the project leaders, the Brits

(10:15):
might be more receptive to taller buildings if they're made
out of natural materials rather than concrete. Here's where we
get a little touchy feely, because they say, like, hey,
you know how sometimes you go outside and it just
feels nice. I wouldn't be great if it felt nice
when you win inside. What if we talk the stuff
that's outside and put it inside, then inside would be

(10:37):
nice like the outside. I'm being a little facetious, but
that's kind of how it comes across. And there is
science behind this, like feeling of nice science it. Yeah,
So there have been studies, I'll say that now. According
to a piece on the University of Cambridge website, recent
studies have shown that timber buildings can have a positive
health effect, and from an armchair psychology perspective, it certainly

(11:02):
seems intuitive right, the idea that you could have this
a natural setting or a more natural setting may feel
more relaxing than a very sterile, you know, artificial synthetic setting. UM,
but it's it's hard to say, like is that true
or is that just uh an intuition that may or
may not have any founding in science. Well, one of

(11:24):
those studies was conducted by the University of British Columbia
and FP Innovations. But to be fair, FP Innovations is
a nonprofit Canadian organization that's closely tied to the forest industry,
So you gotta keep that in mind, like who is
the person, Like what are the entities that are sponsoring
and conducting the study and do they have a vested
interest in the outcome? But the study claims that would

(11:45):
surfaces lower the sympathetic nervous system activation UH, the S
and S in other words, so that means that areas
with wind services tend to be more relaxing and can
help with stress management, which in turn can have a
positive impact on health in general. We've done episodes about
the future of stress, and it is clear stress UH,

(12:07):
certain types of stress affected by the environment, and and
they can have a very powerful effect on your health
and well being. So that's that's not in question. So
in the study, what they ended up doing was they
held an experiment. They had four different office environments with
varying levels of artificial versus natural kind of surfaces, like

(12:30):
wood surfaces and like. Some had a couple of accents
that were made out of wood. There was one where
like the shades were all made out of wood, the table,
the desk was would they had plants in the room.
There was another one that was made out of things
like painted press board, you know that kind of stuff.
So they had a different range um that they could
put the various test subjects into. Those test subjects were

(12:54):
one nineteen university students, And I wrote in the notes,
I'm always in favor of doing mental health tests on
univer city students. That's what they're there for. Uh, And
it is what most mental health tests are done on. Yeah. Yeah, man,
if it weren't for university students, science would be lacking.
Maybe I shouldn't have said mental health psychology behavioral psychology,

(13:15):
especially to be fair. To be fair, I I said
mental health is more or less kind of a tongue
in cheek snarky comment on this, but behavioral psychology would
be much more accurate. So each student was assigned to
one of those four types of office environments. No one
was told what the study was about specifically. Uh So
they had no idea what they were, what was going
to be measured, or how it would be measured. So

(13:38):
that was, you know, it's at least a single blind.
I don't know that. I don't think it was double blind.
I'm pretty sure that people administering the test knew what
was going on. Uh So they had like skin contact
sensors put on to kind of uh detect when there
were spikes in stress. You know, the idea being that
if you detect sweat, someone's obviously feeling a little more

(13:59):
stress than someone who isn't sweating that kind of stuff.
So they put these students in one of those four
office environments. Each student then had to go through three phases,
again not being told what was happening or why it
was happening. The first phase was they were left alone
for ten minutes in the room, which actually had their
their anxiety start to climb because they're sitting there wondering

(14:23):
what's going to happen to them they don't know. Uh.
Then the next phase was that they had to take
an audio mathematic test, so they're listening to math problems
and having to work on them. This this was in
order to again increase their level of anxiety. Let's see
what happens when we take the puppy away. Um. And

(14:43):
then at the end they were left alone again to
kind of decompress, to to recover from the stressful experience
they just had. And UH. All the data would be
analyzed later. And according to the researchers, the S and
S activation was lowest in office environ mints that had
wood services and furnishings. Uh. And they were lowest during

(15:04):
all three phases. So it didn't matter if you're talking
about the initial phase, the actual test, or the distressing part.
Those layers were all lower in the for students who
were in the the office environment that had the wood
surfaces in them. But we gotta keep in mind it
was a small study. Hundred nineteen people's not a lot
in the grand scheme of science. Uh. And it also

(15:26):
had vested parties that were involved in the administration of
this test. And that doesn't mean that the test is invalid.
It doesn't mean that the conclusions are wrong. It just
means we have to keep that in mind when we
hear this and not just say all right, well case closed,
it's definite. Now, well, you know, one thing I would
think is, uh, I was just running through this in

(15:49):
my mind, wondering how I would feel in different different
material environments as far as stress goes trying to do
math problems, and I would think, you know, I wonder
if environments that are most like the environments where I
went to school would be the most stressful, uh so like,
and that would not be wooden environments, so that could

(16:10):
be another you know, like associations. I mean there there's definitely,
again the gut feeling type of stuff. There's definitely some
stuff that makes me feel that they're onto something here.
Even if I don't go so far as to say
this definitively proves to me that that their hypothesis holds water,

(16:30):
because I think of experiences if I had going to
like a rustic cabin and breathing in the smell of
like you can smell the wood and and it has
that very warm tone to it, like there is something
very kind of termites, There is something kind of cozy
and relaxing about that. And uh, it's just the question

(16:53):
of is that in fact something that is scientifically supportable
or is it just like you know, does it have
no bearing whatsoever. Well, I mean another way you could
look at this is you wouldn't even have to get
to the level of science and talking about, you know,
scientifically measurable effects on stress. You could just say what
what do people like? More more people would tell you, yeah,

(17:13):
I like wooden environment. What's what's aesthetic? And uh and
and there are certainly lots of kind of bunk psychology
experiments into into the esthetics of an environment, in the
in the color tones of an environment that are going
to inform uh, you know, your opinion one way or another,
at least your opinion of the scientists. That's fair. I

(17:34):
often think of like my like, I like I like
the whole cabin get away kind of thing, Like I
I enjoy that experience, and I enjoy that environment. My
wife has a preference for very modern kind of architecture
and furnishings, which don't necessarily fall into that same category.

(17:55):
But that's what she finds really relaxing. So it doesn't
necessarily mean that you know, the science is wrong or whatever.
It just may be more complicated than this hypothesis or
it maybe that's totally correct. It's just a study with
a hundred nineteen people. It's hard to say at any rate.
I want to talk a little bit about what makes
this particular type of wood so strong. We we mentioned

(18:17):
that it's lots of different layers. Um. We're specifically talking
about a type of wood product, industrial wood product called
cross laminated timber or c LT. And you're starting to
see this being used in the UK and Canada fairly extensively.
It's starting to get adopted more widely in the United States,

(18:39):
especially since it's the possibility of of having a new
industry in the U S where you could, again with
good stewardship of forests, you have a new export you
could create for construction materials. So how is this stuff made?
It's really cool? So al right, well, first of all,
you have to cut down trees. We haven't figured out
a way of making stuff out of wood without doing that,
so that's step one. But then you have to make

(19:01):
boards out of the trees. Um, and then you dry
the boards in a kiln. Oh okay, well, but there
you're introducing some energy requirements, probably not to the same
extent that you would be using in the creation of cement,
right because you're drying it out. Obviously, if you were
to increase the heat too much, you would have some
issues there. But yes, well, I'm just saying part of
what we're trying to avoid is like all of the

(19:23):
energy absolutely burning the cement for such a long time
and such a high heat use it. Yeah, my my
guess is that the kilns that used to dry boards
are operating at significantly lower temperatures and for less time
than for cement. But then you take the boards and
uh so you put them so that the grain alternates

(19:44):
by ninety degrees level by level. So some boards are gonna,
like all the boards are gonna be the same dimension,
but in some you're gonna have the grain going along
the long side and some some you're gonna have the
grain going along the narrow side. So you stacks stack
them with the grain alternating ninety degrees um. You make
an odd numbered stack of boards, usually between three and seven.

(20:09):
You glue them together using a special type of adhesive,
and then you put it through a pneumatic press to
press the board together and this creates a much stronger
material that is still relatively light compared to alternatives, but
compared to regular wood, it's more dense. And yes, yes,
and so uh and like I said, this stuff can

(20:30):
go up pretty fast. Actually watched a video where a
guy was talking about the process of building with the stuff.
I was trying to I was thinking he was going
to talk about the process of making it. No, he
was talking about using it to actually build. And what
was fascinating to me was he said, so these panels,
and the panels were huge, they were like maybe like
you know, there were several feet wide and many more

(20:51):
feet long. So we can put one of these up
every seven to eight minutes. So building a structure out
of that material goes pretty quickly compared to other types
of materials. So that's one of those huge advantages. Yeah,
and c LT isn't the only type of wood product
that's being investigated for for wooden buildings. UM glued slabs

(21:13):
of bamboo are also being looked at, and different treatments
for different types of wood can make them stronger or stiffer,
a distinction that we're going to talk about a little
bit later on. UM or more resistant to fungus, which
is great to be if your would in a building.
Um and and some theorists, theorists in the industry are
are even imagining. Sorry, I just thought fungus is in nature.

(21:33):
You know, if nature makes people feel better, maybe you
need some fungus in your building. I mean packs packs
of wolves are in nature to bring them on. Are
you sure, I kind of I mean puppy dogs. Um, yes, yes,
so so some some theorists are even imagining that that
that GMO trees could be genetically constructed to provide ultimate

(21:58):
building materials in the future. This has never entered my mind,
so I've thought tons about GMO crops. How do you
know how to alter the genes of of food crops
to make them, you know, have higher yields or more
resistant to herbicides or something like that. But yeah, you
could totally alter the genes of trees to produce a

(22:20):
different kind of timber if you want to. Yeah, something
with with more stronger, better cellulose, which is really the
structure that we're talking about in terms of the benefits
of wood. I'm just thinking of genetically modifying mushrooms so
that smurfs could live in them also lovely. So here's
the question. We we've talked about the possibility of going

(22:42):
back to using wood as a major component in building,
including skyscrapers, which if you had told me about a
few years ago, I thought would have thought it was crazy. Um,
it doesn't make sense. Is it actually more sustainable and
more environmentally friendly than the traditional concrete and steel stuff
that skyscrapers are made out of today? Well, okay. Proponents

(23:07):
say that if if wooden construction like this takes off,
or rather takes off again, UM, trees could be specifically
farmed for for this type of use over long periods,
so so you know, you wouldn't be destroying the rainforest
every time you wanted to erect a new apartment building. UM.
And furthermore, since we're using less and less paper, UM,
old paper timber farms could be applied to the trade

(23:30):
in the meanwhile, while while we're getting our tree farms
up to up to standard. UM. Furthermore, people say that,
you know, trees are used to store carbon dioxide while
they're alive, and they retain it when they're dead, So
so you're helping keep some carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,
you've you've you've locked that carbon dioxide away, and you're
growing more trees to replace the ones you've used, so

(23:52):
you're technically removing CEO two from the atmosphere in that approach. Also,
in terms of g usage, WOULD is a better insulator
than concrete or glass, or steel or aluminum, and I
mean meaning that it has a relatively low thermal conductivity,
so that could mean savings in terms of heating and
cooling and you're finished buildings. Um. Also, since would, as

(24:16):
you said earlier, Jonathan, is so much lighter than concrete,
we would use wayless energy shipping it and putting up
structures that that contain it. So we're talking about a
smaller energy investment in WOULD than it would take for
concrete or steel, both in the construction and in the
transportation of construction materials. All right, sure, um, And as

(24:36):
a bonus to communities here, c LT buildings are are
typically pre fabricated structures, even if they are being individually designed.
A lot of the construction occurs off site, so when
they go up, they go up quieter and quicker than
concrete based structures. So that's nice. I'm speaking as a
human person who has apartments going up on either side

(24:56):
of her house right now, Yeah, I would. I would
love it if that would is less noisy every day
at seven thirty in the morning. Right. So, let's let's
look at some of the wooden structures that currently exists
that are kind of like the models that we're working
off of to think of these potential future projects, like
skyscrapers made out of timber. Yeah, I was, I was

(25:19):
looking into this and it's and it's pretty fascinating if
you're an architecture nerd hopefully even if you're not so okay, So,
buildings that have like a concrete base sometimes called a
podium in the industry, which is like the first floor
usually uh and then a few upper stories consisting of
lightwood framing have been around for decades. This isn't a
particularly new concept. But but taller buildings and some some

(25:42):
made entirely of wood framing, but most honestly incorporating some
steel or concrete elements have been have been sprouting up
over the past like five or six years, um and
and um Like. The more that I read into this,
the more puns I came across, and I have not
included all of them in this industry, also growding up.

(26:04):
I also came across one where it decided to use
all the fire puns. I thought, well, that's kind of tasteless. Yeah,
it's really catching fire, like, um can we can? We not? Anyway,
So most of these structures so far are apartment buildings.
In Australia and in Europe, there's there's an eight story

(26:26):
high rise in Finland, ten story Forte in Melbourne, and
the Cube in London and the fourteen story Treat which
means tree in in in Norway. UM. In North America,
timber buildings are more rare, but there are a few
projects that are in development. There's already a really lovely
c LT structure in Canada. It's the University of British

(26:46):
Columbia's Earth Sciences Building UM. But but Seattle has planned
a twelve story mixed use project called Framework that's supposedly
coming over the next couple of years thanks to a
one point five million dollar grant from the US to
Partment of Agriculture, which it won in a contest for
tall wood building designs, and if it goes up, indeed,
it will be America's first tall wood building that's cool. Yeah,

(27:09):
I gotta say really quickly though, that University of British
Columbia Earth Sciences building that was one of the buildings
that was actually shown in the video I was watching
about the construction process, and the guy was actually talking
about the free standing staircase that is inside that building,
which is gorgeous. Yeah. You look at you and he says, like,
this thing. This shows how strong this this material is

(27:33):
because it's it's anchored to the walls of the building,
but it itself is a very tall there are no
beams under it, right, It's very impressive to look at
the gorgeous design of this building. And I'm really impressed
with some of the approaches that I've seen architects take
using this material in mind, you know, thinking like, well,

(27:54):
it's gonna be made out of this stuff, so let
me take a slightly different approach than I would with
a traditional building. Yeah. Yeah, and a lot of them,
a lot of them are so gorgeous. So like, so, y'all,
do do yourselves a favor. If you want to look
at something pretty, go go google like CLT tall wood
building or something like that, and and come up with
all of these things but but but b Yeah, it's

(28:14):
it's fascinating to me that a lot of the designs
skew decidedly modern um, which is sort of like the
opposite of what you'd expect from like a rustic wooden thing.
But but but but turns out being so beautiful. Yeah,
it turned well. For one thing, the boards that they're producing,
they're not going to be evocative of like the rough
hewn log cabin. That's not what we're talking about here.

(28:37):
It's a very different world when you're talking about this
industrial wood that's been through and and and an industrial process.
They've been through a pneumatic press for goingness sakes, Um,
it's it's not akin to that rustic approach. Uh, And
yet you get that effect of a warm invironing environment. Yeah,

(28:58):
especially has those I love those tones, like the color
that you get with depending upon the types of wood
you're using, that you get using this particular type of material.
So so, there are a few other projects that are
in the works that I wanted to mention, the aptly
named Tall Wood Building at the University of British Columbia,
which is set to be eighteen stories high and to

(29:18):
provide student housing there's a nineteen story cultural center slash
hotel going up in Sweden and a twenty story mixed
use building going up in Vienna. So things are moving
and shaken in the wood building industry. And and honestly,
it's at this point not as much physics as much
as regulation that is keeping this from being more widespread

(29:42):
than it currently is because because building codes, as as
we have mentioned about the fire thing, are really a
huge hurdle to to wood framed wood framed structures. Um.
But but but advances in the industry could and will hopefully
lead to updates in both fire codes and building codes
and getting some good, good pointy legal distinction among different

(30:04):
types of wood materials and and different combinations of those
materials with concrete and steel to allow us for increased
opportunities to to incorporate wood into construction. Yeah, and I
like I like hearing that. I like the idea of
being able to define these things so that we can
remove the barriers there and and seemore develop in this.

(30:26):
I love the notion of a timber um uh, you know, skyscraper.
It's such it's such a counterintuitive idea to me. The
only thing that I think would be stranger is if
you built a structure out of bone. Yeah, how about

(30:47):
we build some cities out of bones and shells? Yeah?
When when you Joe mentioned the idea of using bone
or or a bone like material to build structures out
of the first thing I thought of was city of Bones.
Sounds like it could totally be a novel in the
Song of Ice and Fire series. I knew there was

(31:08):
already there had to be a novel called City of Bone,
and I looked it up. Yeah, there is one urban
fantasy novel. I'm not quite sure what that means. I
think it's like with tall buildings. And I read some
Jim Butcher. Okay, Jim Butcher got that urban fantasy downpat
definitely with wizards and cities. Yeah, okay, did they take
the subway sometimes? Actually, magic doesn't interfere with electricity, right, yeah,

(31:31):
Jim Butcher's wizards. Yeah, he makes he makes technology fail
around them, computers, smartphones, like things that are that are
necessary to the plot. His magic will interfere with those. Cool. Yeah, Okay,
So how about building some tall buildings in cities out
of out of bone like structures? So here comes Cambridge. Again,

(31:53):
there's a twenty June. Just recently, in fact reading this
was what gave me the idea for this episode. There's
a June Cambridge University research feature on the work of
Dr Michelle Oyen of Cambridge's Engineering Department and OI in
works with constructing biomemetic materials. We talked about biomemetics all
the time on this podcast, trying to create technology that

(32:16):
mimics things we find in nature. So a lot of
times that might be nanomachines or or you know, robotics,
but in this case it's talking about bioinspired materials that
take after the materials that are used to make up
tissues in the bodies of animals. Um and so the
type of materials she's been looking into in her research
have been things like artificial eggshell and artificial bone. So

(32:41):
no surprise that these could be very useful in creating
things like medical devices such as prosthetics and implants. But
um what if these types of materials could also be
the structural basis for our buildings. So here's why these
are interesting. We already know what it's like to try
to build a holding out of minerals. You know, you've

(33:01):
got concrete, cement, you know, rock based materials that you
can build a building out of. But the eggshell and
bone are not just minerals. There. There are a mixture
of minerals and proteins. Bones are about half and half,
with the mineral component being high hydroxy appetite or hydroxyl appetite.
It's a calcium based mineral and the protein component mainly

(33:25):
being collagen. Eggshells are a little bit different. They're much
higher mineral content, only about five percent protein. But these
combinations of minerals and proteins make ideal structural materials. There's
a reason your body uses them. Uh they're they're very adaptable,
and they're very strong and very resilient. So the minerals
give the material hardness, but the proteins give the material toughness.

(33:49):
And these are actually different physical concepts. If you're not familiar,
quick refresher. Hardness is how resistant a material is to
permanent change in formation. So a material that's resistant to cutting, scratching,
permanent bending, that's a hard material, a tough material. Toughness

(34:10):
refers to how much energy material can absorb before it fractures.
So an easy way to remember this is that toughness
is the opposite of brittleness. Something that's brittle and breaks
easily is not tough. Uh. So many materials are one
or the other, Like a big piece of rubber might
be tough but not hard. A piece of glass, on

(34:33):
the other hand, hard but not tough, right exactly. But
biomaterials like bones are both hard and tough, which would
come in awful handy if you wanted to build a
structure out of such material. You want something that has
both of those qualities exactly. So how do you build
a synthetic or artificial biomaterial based on the concept behind

(34:56):
things like bone and eggshell? Well, essentially you come by
in the mineral components you're using with with the sample
of the protein collagen which you find all throughout animal bodies,
and you know you can get for research purposes. And
so a cool thing about these two different structures I've
brought up bones and eggshells is that they have very
different mineral and protein interacting structures. And because of these differences,

(35:20):
oi And thinks that you might be able to create
even stronger materials by weaving bone inspired templates and eggshell
inspired templates together into the same layer of material. Interesting.
So it's kind of like, uh, you know, if you
want to think of it, it's it's like taking a
more granular approach to what I was chatting about with

(35:41):
the c LT and that you're you're binding. You're binding
slabs of wood together with a ninety degree change in
the direction of the grain, and that in turn increases
the strength of the overall piece. But in this case,
you're talking about two totally different structures that you're kind
of interlacing together to get the best of both. You
put them together into a lattice type structure, and because

(36:04):
they have different qualities, they sort of reinforce each other. Yeah, so,
so how how does this stuck up in terms of
like greenness? Yeah, that that's the thing. So the problems
with things like steel and concrete cement being the ingredient,
and concrete, they take all this energy to produce and
they're all these carbon emissions associated with the production. Apparently,

(36:24):
this is much less energy intensive process for making these
biommetic materials takes place in the lab at room temperature
rather than hours of intense firing. But we need the
biomaterials in order to make it happen. So do do
you have enough collagen lying around. To build a skyscraper

(36:45):
need slaughter exactly right now, The obvious way to get
collagen is from animals. You need it for material synthesis,
but from animal bodies we're back to blood bricks, right. Yeah,
it's not ideal because I mean, for one thing, you
would look at a building and then you would just

(37:07):
naturally think how many how many pigs seals baby seals, uh,
floors three through seventeen. That is why to make this
a feasible construction material, we probably need to find a
way to substitute a protein element that doesn't come from animals,
like a synthetic protein, or maybe something that could be

(37:30):
derived from algae or bacteria or some other farmabile organism
doesn't have a nervous system to make you feel bad about.
And on top of that, I mean, even you're talking
about in the lab, it could be created under room
temperature conditions, which is in fact that's that's a huge
advantage on the energy side. The question also beyond where

(37:50):
do you get the protein? Once you've answered that question satisfactorily,
where you're presumably not slaughtering hundreds of animals or to
get to the protein, you need The next question is
can you scale that production to a point where it
would be useful for a real construction project. I don't
know what the answer is. Oien claimed in this piece

(38:11):
that that it is scalable, interested in can be scaled
up in the lab. But but obviously you know, we don't.
We never really tried it, so we don't know. So
not only are we going to have to address the
idea of changing the types of materials we're using to build,
we also need to rethink the way we're actually building

(38:32):
stuff today. I mean, it does seem like there's some progress.
I think you said you were seeing some things that
there's some progress towards things like artificial collagen, right, but
we may not be there yet. But yeah, the the
whole culture of construction is going to have to change, right,
because the same thing is true probably for using wood
instead of concrete. I mean, people have a way of

(38:54):
doing things they we use concrete, we use steal. So
a wooden structure or brick structure, steel and glass structure,
concrete structure, and a bio mimetic bone temple all have
differences at the blueprint stage that you have to study
and take into account. Sure, yeah. I mean it's it

(39:14):
may seem like we're we're saying the obvious, but this
is something that you do have to take. You have
to keep in mind. It's not like it's not as
easy as just saying, hey, this other material is better,
let's go to that now and from now on everyone
uses this. There's a lot of momentum and inertia that's
built into the systems that we human beings have designed.

(39:36):
Sometimes that's to our benefits. Sometimes it means that we
feel like progress isn't happening because we're not changing as
quickly as we would like. But it's just a it's
a matter of fact. It's not something that you can
snap your fingers and and everything changes from this point forward.
An assembly line is really great at creating your your
your standard coffee mug. But if suddenly you want to

(39:57):
make a coffee mug out of bone, right, it's yeah,
or a little bit of grinding to a halt. Right,
You're like, like, well, we've decided now that the coffee
mugs are all going to be made out of bio
mimetic bone, and they're going to like skulls. It's going
to require a little bit of retooling of our manufacturing process.
Everyone who wants to drink out of a skull for
the record, I would buy that. Like today, I have

(40:20):
three coffee mugs that are sugar skull designed, so I
also would have one of those. Uh So, out of curiosity,
I looked up away in scientific papers just to see
if there were any more specifics that that I could
find about the details of her recent research. And a
lot of the research she's been involved in uh in
one way or another seemed focused on studying micro environments

(40:41):
or scaffolds that can facilitate natural artificial lost teo genesis.
And of course osteogenesis is the process of growing new
bone cells. It's the process you would want to mimic
if you're going to try to grow some synthetic bone
in the lab. So there were several papers about using
hydro gels to simulate the micro environment in which bone

(41:02):
cells grow. One of the most cited was a paper
from with Annabel L. Butcher and Giovannis off a do
called nano fibrous hydrogel composite as mechanically robust tissue engineering scaffolds.
What does all that mean? So when you're when you're
doing tissue engineering in the lab, cells usually have to
be grown on what's called a scaffold. It's a it's

(41:24):
some type of material, often a polymer, that gives a
shape and an environment in which the in vitro tissues
can assume their function. So it's sort of like you
need to have a muffin tin to bake your muffins in.
If you just tried to pour your muffin batter onto
the oven rack, you would not produce ideal muffin. No,
probably a fire, but no. We we've talked about this

(41:45):
in the idea of three D printing organs for example.
That's that's scaffolding is absolutely necessary, not just for the
cells to to have like something to glom onto, but
in order for them to actually take on the function
that you want them to do. Right and uh And
in many cases, what you want is a scaffold that
will that will hold a shape while the cells can

(42:07):
grow around it to assume the morphology that you want,
but also that will itself degrade or disappear in some
way when the tissue needs to fill in that space.
So it needs to be there long enough to tell
the cells where to go and guide them into place,
but then go away when they need to fill in
all the missing gaps. Uh So, hydrogels might be a

(42:30):
good solution here. Hydrogels are gelatinous semi solids. They have
some of the properties of a liquid and some of
the properties of a solid, and that they have a
constant volume and hold their shape like a like a
solid does. But they can also be disrupted by mechanical
you know, activity like Jello is a good example of

(42:50):
a hydrogel. When you when you read about a hydrogel,
just think about something like the consistency of jello. And
the paper concluded that hydrogels make great scaffolding for tissue engineering,
but that they don't have great quote mechanical performance, which
I'm just picturing. That's funny to them, I think, Jello,
what what is its mechanical performance? Like, yeah, but you

(43:13):
can improve the mechanical What they concluded is you can
improve the mechanical performance of hydrogels by lacing them with
a fibrous component or nanofibers. Uh So, Anyway, I think
that's that's sort of the stage that a lot of
the research in h in the present is at. There
they're looking at creating these environments, uh to grow these

(43:34):
materials in interesting but back to back to buildings made
of bones. So if you imagine that we're we're getting
some kind of biomamentic bone or eggshell or bone eggshell
composite type material, and we're trying to figure out how
to use this in in building. Some other advantages do
naturally come to mind. One of them is that bone

(43:55):
inspired buildings ultimately could provide not only environmentally sustainable materials
that are both hard and tough, but think about other
things bones do. One of them is that bones can heal.
Bones on Star Trek healed crew members. Yes, yeah, that's true.
We should build buildings out of data. We have wharves.

(44:22):
Oh that's true. We must stop. No, a broken bone
where I think about a broken bone properly set right
can commend itself. Now, it's not like that automatically a
synthetic bone material would necessarily be able to do this, right.
I mean, unless you built osteo blasts into it. It's

(44:43):
you're right, you'd have to set out to give it
this capability. Um, and it would depend on how it
was designed. But this is another goal you can strive for,
and it seems quite achievable if your basis for your
material is bone. So you imagine you could have like
a bone damn. That's great, a bone. Damn fissures appear
in the damn over time because of pressure, But then

(45:03):
those tiny fractures could be healed up by a process
akinned osteogenesis. You know. So this is like the song,
you know, the song Damn bones, damn bones. I'm almost
ashamed of myself. I want to thank the listener who
sent in the book about puns. It's true. I actually

(45:26):
have it at my desk. That would be sparkling blue.
Thank you, sparkling Blue. Uh no, this I was really
fascinated by this topic. It was one of those things
where as soon as you heard the idea of cities
made of wooden bone, it kind of is evocative of
like fantasy novels. Sure, and I mean I'm picturing that
any building made made of artificial bone would have to

(45:48):
be designed based on like hr Geigers. Right, yeah, anyway,
I've heard both. Uh yeah, I've said Geiger before, so
we've got it covered. I'm someone saying, no, it's it's
g j like, oh shoot, it's like that gift Jeff thing. Um.
Then we're in trouble. But I love this idea and
I love that, you know, this was something that I

(46:11):
got to to learn about today, Like this was not
something where I kind of knew about it moving into
this episode. It was all discovery for me, and I
love that. I hope that you listeners out there experience
something akin to that. And if you guys have suggestions
for future episodes, maybe there's some other weird or awesome
topic that is future oriented and you would like us

(46:34):
to cover it, let us know. Send us an email.
The address is FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com,
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(47:00):
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