June 27, 2014 • 36 mins
Spiders are fascinating creatures. They play a crucial role in most of the world's ecosystems, and they could even teach us a lot about how to make new biomimetic technologies. Join the podcast team for a look at our creepy crawly future.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
the podcast that looks at the future and says, spider
he is our hero. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. Hey, everybody, quick,
(00:24):
Spider check. Spider checks? Are the spiders on your body?
I don't think so. I've got three ticks, but no spiders.
I'm not a record free I'm just kidding. I don't
only ticks, I have a verbal what what so? Uh? Yeah, yeah, No,
no spider spiders on your body. You couldn't find any
(00:44):
of mine either, Which is that that's something of a comfort.
Why why do you ask? Well, I just we had
to establish that before we could move on so quick.
Round the table. How do we feel about spiders? Generally
in favor? There are a couple of exceptions that wig
me out, Lauren. I like them, like them, I do.
I find them fascinating and cute. I appreciate them very
(01:05):
much cognitively, but I think that they are the physical
embodiment of fear. I I am. I am designated as
the person who takes care of any sort of spider
incident in our home. Spider incidents also any other type
of creepy crawley sort of thing. So spiders are just
(01:26):
one form I would say bugs, But of course then
I would offend all people who are true lovers of spiders,
which are of course arachnids. Uh. Yeah. So, but most
of the time I just capture them. I do a
capture and release program because I think spiders are incredibly helpful,
so I don't I don't like to extinguish their little lives. Well, yeah,
if you don't like your entire body being covered in insects,
(01:49):
you should appreciate spiders certainly. Uh. And I not being
entirely covered in insects Another fun fact. Yeah, I get
pedantic about the arachnid distinction too. I you know, I
just can't deal with it. A while back, there was
an AP and Associated Press story going out. There was
just some little fluff piece about there were some children
(02:10):
visiting the office of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and
it said that the governor smashed a spider in front
of the students. That was the story, but it called
it a spider, and then a paragraph later referred to
it as an insect but not the same thing. That
that's like saying, um, a mammal and a bony fish.
(02:35):
They're they're like separated by that much distinction. I think
the headline show should have been politician Christie in between
bridge uh bridge conspiracy theories, squishes, a possible insects slash
a acted details to follow when you get more on
this story. Uh yeah, this is complicates or or okay,
(02:57):
So here here are two specific types of spiders that
do give me a little bit of Willie's when to
look at them, or at least pictures of them. I
have not seen either spider moving around in person, but
you've probably eaten both of them. Well, I don't know.
The curved spiny spider is more is native to Asia,
and I have not yet made my way there. That
doesn't mean that I couldn't have possibly encountered one some
(03:19):
other way, but pieces of your food somewhere it could be. Yeah,
curved spider, that's the actual name, curved spiny. And we
have a picture in our notes, which I realize not
terribly helpful for you listeners out there. But the picture
it looks almost like the body shape is almost triangular.
And then uh, in the at the base of the
(03:40):
abdomen are these long horns that extend outward. And that's
actually a female. The males do not have the horns. Yeah,
it's a little bit like a like a wishbone with
a spider attached. I was going to say, it looks
like Tim Curry and Legend, right, Yeah, in spider form, right,
I do not want spider him Curry. No, it only
(04:02):
it only choose insects, not scenery. Then I have the
Ravine trapdoor spider, which you know, Joe, before the podcast started,
you said, this thing doesn't even look real. It does
look kind of weird because if you were to view
the spider, uh, like like, let's say it's just crawling
around on the ground. You were reviewing it from above,
it looks like someone has cut it's abdomen in half,
(04:24):
like it's it's just a flat ended abdomen as opposed
to a rounded one. Yeah. In the back of its abdomen,
it's just this flat disc with the design that looks
like one of the Dharma initiative from Yeah, it looks
kind of like it could be a poker chip or
a coin even And and the thing is, this is
a trapdoor spider. It digs a burrow and it crawls
(04:44):
down in it. So if you were to actually see one,
you would be more likely to see it's it's rear end,
that flat rear end, and think, hey, that looks neat
I should pick that up, and then immediately regret your decision.
These are native to the state we live in. These
are native to Georgia. And if you've never seen a
picture of one, like I said, if you look at
what it looks like, it's fake. In fact, I remember
(05:05):
seeing comments on a blog post about these things where
one of the well one of them said, no, that's
a that's a spider that was injured by being cut
in half and uh and then it healed. You should
be ashamed of yourself. And there's like, no, dude, this
is actually the way these things look in real life. Well,
we'll try to remember to post some post some pictures
on social Yeah, when this this podcast goes live at
(05:27):
any rate, Yeah, there there's some spiders that kind of
wake us out. But we're not just here to talk
about the future of getting the willis. We're here to
talk about science and technology. So I think we should
discuss how spiders fit into our future, specifically how they're
going to be inspiring technology that matters to us. So
we're talking about bio mimetics again, that's right. So, yeah,
(05:50):
we've established that spiders are very important to us in
a natural way absolute cleaning up insects in the ecosystem.
But by looking at natural designs that we find in
the organic kingdoms, we can actually see, hey, you know,
nature has been working on this design for a long time.
There's no shame in sort of getting some inspiration from
(06:11):
what's already been done. Sure, especially when you know you
get something as completely effective as, for example, spider silk. Yeah. Now,
this is the main focus of this podcast is spider silk.
Now we're not saying that spiders don't have a myriad
of other incredibly amazing attributes and features, but spider silk
alone is phenomenal stuff. Yeah, spider silk is i will say,
(06:34):
completely amazing. So it's very tough and ductile. It's able
to withstand enormous stretching pressure before it breaks. So according
to some accounts, spider silk you can stretch it out
by about of its length without its snap. That is
absolutely amazing, and we talk about ten style strength, which
is that ability to withstand that pulling force before it snaps.
(06:57):
And the fact that this has such elasticity makes it
an incredible material. Well yeah, and it's the elasticity paired
with how strong it is for its weight and size.
Uh So, I was actually reading a really funny paper online.
So if y'all seen Spiderman two, yeah, yeah, okay, so
Sam Raimi, Spiderman's not some other Spider Man. This isn't
(07:19):
the one where he disco dances down the show. No, No,
Tony McGuire, Oh my godness, Molina as Cock. Right, brilliant, brilliant,
uh performance, I would say, right, wonderful. So Doc Cock
is fighting with Spider Man on top of a train
and he basically he hits the switch and throws the
train out of control. You know, there's no breaks and
(07:40):
it's barreling down towards the end of the line. Right,
And since Spider Man is not Superman, he actually wants
to save people and not just let rampant destruction rain
down upon poor average mortals. Right, I think you're referring
to Man of Steel, not Superman in general. But yeah,
Spider Man cares about people. So he wants to stop
the train, right, right, How's he going to do it? Well,
(08:01):
he tries a few things. He tries to sort of
brace against the tracks, and that doesn't work. So then
he gets the idea. He puts his body out on
the front of the train and he shoots spider webs
out into you know, he can shoot the webs out
of his hands, and he shoots them out so that
they attached to the buildings he's passing by as he goes,
and this forms a kind of V shaped uh rubber
(08:23):
band sort of of tensile strength to press back against
the force of the train as it barrels forward. And
spoiler alert, he does manage to stop the trains. It
would have been kind of a bummer if if all
of his efforts had failed and that people just plummeted
to their death or something. Sure, but you know, many
times in superhero movies, superheroes do things that don't necessarily
(08:44):
have anything to do with physics at all whatsoever. Right,
So could this actually be something Let's say that let's
say that we were able to scale up the Spider's silk.
Is that even remotely possible? Yeah? Based on a paper
I read. Yes, I was actually reading this paper in
the Journal of Physics Special Topics, which is an undergraduate
(09:06):
journal run by the Department of Physics and Astronomy at
the University of Lester. And by the way, this journal
is delightful. I can't wait to read more of it.
I've never discovered it before. But it's obviously not going
to be like a top resource for ground breaking research,
but it's more full of kind of fun and weird topics,
like science fiction based things. And you know what, if
(09:27):
we wanted to offset global warming by moving the Earth
farther away from the Sun, how much farther would we
have to push it back and it's radius. See, these
are cool questions. I mean, obviously there are no practical
answers here because that's not something we could do. It's
all just kind of estimating. But using what knowledge we
do have to come up with interesting answers to weird questions,
(09:48):
that's fantastic. Uh, And so I really like it in anyway.
This one paper was called doing Whatever a Spider Can
by Brian Forster in Stone, and they calculated the force
that would have been required to stop a train as
Spider Man does in the movie and then they compared
that to the resistance force that could have been created
by real spider webs assuming proportional scaling, and they concluded
(10:10):
in the end of the paper that if Spider Man's
webs were proportionally as strong as real spider silk, they
actually should have been sufficient to stop the train as
depicted in the movie. See this is incredible. I mean,
it's just it does demonstrate how amazing spider silk really is.
And also this is you know, that was key to
the formation of the mythology of Spider Man. I mean,
(10:32):
the whole point was that the silk that Peter Parker
creates is supposed to mimic what spider webs are naturally
capable of doing. And even back when when Spider Man
was being created, everyone was pretty aware of the fact
that spider silk is really strong stuff, particularly when you
take into consideration how thin that those those individual strands
(10:53):
tend to be. So I mean, it's it's great to
see that not only was this sort of common knowledge, uh,
it not only did it bear out, but it shows
that this was actually not necessarily plausible, but a possibility.
If you were able to scale that up, it would
in fact, have been sufficient to stop that out of
control car. Yeah, so I was interested in finding out, well,
(11:16):
what is the toughest known spider silk. It's actually not
just the toughest snow and spider silk, but it's the
toughest known biomaterial. It's a form of spider silk that
comes from the Darwin's bark spider, the Carorostrius Darwinnie that's
a Madagascar and it's a spider that makes silk that's
up to ten times tougher than kevlar fibers. And toughness
(11:39):
is the amount of kinetic energy the material is able
to withstand without fracturing. In a two thousand ten paper
in pl Os One, the author's discussed how they identified
the spiders a good candidate for especially tough silk by
observing how it created gigantic orb webs that were like
up to two point eight square meters, which is more
than thirty point one square feet. Is terrifyingly enormously gigantic
(12:04):
spiderwebs suspended over water sources like streams and rivers, So
you can imagine like seals and deer catch the flying fish. Now,
I think they were catching for catching insects coming up
off the water, and the authors point out that silk
of this kind would be a great inspiration for incredibly
tough bio mimetic materials. So they are all kinds of
(12:24):
things we could use spider silk for if we had
enough of it, in situations where we need materials that
are very light and very strong and very elastic. Okay,
so this has enormous potential. But I think that, I mean,
clearly what all of us are thinking about here first
is clothing. Yeah. Yeah, you can make you a really
really lightweight bullet proof vest or something like that, or
(12:47):
you can make it I mean like fashion. I mean
I want a spider dress. Well, you're in luck, and
all you need to do is break into a museum
and steal it, because there has actually recently been had
an entire garment, actually two whole garments made from spider silk.
So in two thousand nine, Simon Pierce, who is a
(13:07):
British art historian and textile expert, and Nicholas Godly, and
American fashion designer, revealed the result of this textile experiment
they'd been working on while they were both living on
the island of Madagascar. Again in the same place as
the Darwin's bark spider. And this was a spider silk cloth.
Now it wasn't made by the Darwin spark spider. It
(13:27):
was made by golden orb spiders of Madagascar, and they've
been known to produce very brightly colored yellow silk, this
beautiful golden hue. So the project started in two thousand four.
They had the help of a team of seventy workers
who collected wild spiders for the project, and then another
dozen workers who harvested the silk with hand powered extraction machines.
(13:55):
The silk extraction machinery was actually inspired by a similar
system more than a hundred years old, which the French
missionary Jacob Paul Kembaway used to harvest filaments for spider
silk textiles around the turn of the last centuries, around
the year nineteen hundred in Madagascar. Um. But coming back
to this project, the recent one, over a period of
(14:18):
four years that they were able to spin the silk
into thread and produce an eleven foot long by four
ft wide piece of cloth out of spider silk. It's
bright yellow. It's kind of strange to imagine handling. I
just imagine incredibly exhausted spiders being very very proud of
(14:41):
their work. Yeah, you you'd be pretty on target there,
at least about the exhausted part. So producing spider silk
is not easy. So we can make silk from silkworms.
That's not that much of a problem. Well not not
if you're a person. But have you ever asked a
silkworm how they feel about? It's true, no one knows
what it's like when you're a silk worm. Well you know.
(15:02):
But but silkworm are relatively um docile creatures. I mean,
they basically just hang out being worms and produced the
silk stuff. Spiders, as it turns out, are less friendly,
aus especially to each other. So spiders are cannibals. They're
also really aggressive, aren't they in territorial while some are
(15:22):
And yeah, you can't pin spiders up together because after
the work is done each night, they'll eat each other.
So apparently Peers and Godly tried to create a reusable
spider farm at first, but um I wrote an article
for the Economist where Peers explained that they'd have a
collection of five spiders that would cannibalize itself down to
(15:44):
fifty or so over the course of a few days.
You know, I think if if Ford had to work
with these kind of problems, we never would have had
an assembly line. Yeah, just say if the machinery ate itself.
So apparently, in in the more final version, the project
involved constantly releasing spiders and then catching new ones. It's
(16:07):
a very work intensive project. Exactly. Apparently they ended up
using more than a million wild spiders for the production
of this one cloth. One million, sixty three thousand to
be exactly. You gotta figure some of those were recaptures.
Some of the spiders are like not again. So the
(16:27):
cloth eventually went on display in the American Museum of
Natural History in two thousand nine. Uh, And people say
it has really unique tactile characteristics, like it feels vaguely sticky,
and that the cloth threads are both very very light
and very very strong. I don't think I want sticky clothing.
I worked pretty hard at my clothing not being sticky.
(16:50):
Somebody had to wear it because they didn't stop at
this one shawl. They created the first piece that they
created a cape after that. Yeah, they made a cape.
They made a cap up and they made a lady
wear it. And there are pictures at her. There are
pictures of her wearing it, and she did they make her?
I don't know if they personally did. I assume she
(17:11):
was some kind of model. I'm sure there are pictures
of this one particular woman on the internet wearing this
spider silk cape. She looks very serious, as she looks
very regal. But you know, in every photograph she's thinking,
you get this miracle of nature off my skin. I'm
looking at it right now, and uh, you see what
I'm saying. She seems to have the same same sort
(17:33):
of expression of disdain that most fashionable models are are
are told to cultivate. I'm not saying that they have
disdain like you're not good enough to wear this? Yeah, yeah,
you know what, I can't read the expression anymore. Beyond that, Well,
if she's out there listening, you can ride into us
and tell us what it was like to wear that
spider cape. Yeah, let us know. It's a very specific
(17:57):
call out there. But okay, so spider silk has amazing properties,
but this project shows how difficult it is to mass
produce useful amounts of it. I mean, obviously we're gonna
have trouble coming up with a million spiders every time
you want to make a pair of socks. So so
clearly getting spiders to make this silk for us is
(18:17):
not the most practical approach, especially if we want to
talk about mass production, right right, especially for something like clothing,
which I do want to point out this was a
viewer question from YouTube, actually Mr Richard Miller and I
and I mentioned the full name because that is his
full YouTube name. UM asked us about this on on
YouTube and our video about bio memetics, So thank you
(18:40):
so much for writing that question in Richard. Yeah, so,
so spider silk from spiders probably not the practical solution,
not feasible at all, but again, as we said, very useful.
So is there a way we can make useful amounts
of spider silk or something very much like spider silk
without milking a million spiders. Well, we're working on it.
(19:01):
The short answer at this very current point in time
is not really but all right, so uh so, some
researchers have created spider silk from silkworms. They they genetically
engineered the silkworms, which produce hella more silk than spiders do,
to create stuff that is not quite as strong as
actual spider silk. It's it's sort of a hybrid between
(19:22):
the two. Still pretty cool. So this way you get
you get the benefit of being able to produce the
silk without the concern of the product producers eating one
another at the end of every day or biting you. Right, Okay,
that's fair, and and more silk than you would from
the spiders overall, uh, fewer, fewer silkworms or spiders involved. Yes,
(19:44):
you can also code bacteria to create spider silk. Well, bacteria, bacteria, Well,
they're not creating the silk. There's there's a few steps
in this process here. First you take and or engineer
a gene that encodes the production of spider silk proteins. Okay,
and you pop that gene into some easily programmable bacteria,
like for example equally. Um. Yeah, it's it's nasty, but
(20:07):
it's one of those that we know a lot about. Yeah. Yeah,
you can just kind of scrape out part of its
genetic code and be like here, instead of doing this
other thing, we want you to produce this protein. Um.
Then you must about with the bacteria is metabolism to
give it the right building blocks to create the silk
proteins and bam, you've got we little silk factories. But okay,
(20:28):
wait a minute, that just sounds like that would leave
you with the protein, right right, Yeah, So that's that's
the first part. Once you've got this raw protein material,
you need to purify it into silk fiber and then
spin the fibers into the actual tensile silk strands. Um.
Part of this involves stretching the fiber to align its molecules,
which is possibly best done using a mechanical actuator, which
(20:52):
is like a little spider silk taffy pole. I didn't
think it was possible for me to get more disturbed
as this podcast, and yet somehow it's And I don't
even find spiders to be that ikey or anything, but
this this is weird. With start with Tim Curry from
Legend Spider, and we just go downhill from well that's
all right, Well, I'm sure, I'm sure that it's gonna
(21:14):
turn around and by the end of this I'm just
going to be singing the praises of spiders. Well, are
you ready for something really silly? Sure, hit me with it.
What if instead of spider silk we used spiber silk. So,
so we flipped the d around it. That's essentially the process.
What is spiber silk. So one of the companies that's
(21:34):
that's working with bacteria to create spider silk is called
Spiber b e R. So the b being from bacteria
I would imagine or something. Um, but they're they're talking there.
I mean, they've got these grand plans that they're talking about,
like building cars out of spider Shut up and skeptical
(21:57):
of that. Well, okay, so here's the like over on
tech stuff. We recently did a pair of episodes about
carbon fiber and it's it's really impressive stuff. It's some
like six lighter than steel, but five times is strong.
And Spiber is claiming that they're artificial spider silk. Spiber
silk maybe as as strong as steel and lighter even
(22:18):
than carbon fiber. Alright, So, and of course lighter cars
means that the the engine has to work less to
move the car, so it ends up being a more
efficient vehicle in the grand scheme of things. Okay, now
I want to apologize and back off on my skepticism little. Obviously,
I guess they're not talking about making every part of
the car out of No. No, I imagine like the
(22:39):
engine would still be made of engine, but some parts
of it would be made the body that chases. It's
it's why do I never pronounce that? Correct? I go
through like nine pronunciations in my head. None of them
is pronounced. So yeah, No, the chassis, the body of
the car, like those elements will be made of this
(23:00):
bider silk material we talk about. When you talk about
carbon fiber, you're not really talking about a body that's
made out of fibers. You're talking about a reinforced material
that has these fibers that produce that that resiliency and
decrease decrease in in weight as well. So some sort
of thing. You're also talking about using fibers to spin
(23:20):
a cloth and then reinforcing that cloth with a resin,
which I imagine is the process that they are imagining. Right.
It sets it into a specific shape and then it
does not move out of that shape. You know, you
can apply heat or whatever, and it's gonna it's going
to retain the shape that you gave it due to
the resins that you've added in the process. Okay, so
is there anything else we can use to make artificial
(23:41):
spider fiber other than fiber bacteria. Oh yeah, plants, tobacco
and alfalfa in particular seem like decent candidates for for
growing this protein. Um or hate goats, of course, I
mean goats. I mean if goats simulator has taught me nothing,
it's taught me that a goat's tongue is at least
(24:03):
as sticky as a spider web. Wait, this is goats
with a tea, not gobes. Not no, no, there's not
goat bacteria. We're talking about goats, all right, So you
guys might actually remember this one from from the headlines
of the Internet. Some researchers introduced this gene that you know,
encodes the production of spider silk proteins into the sequence
(24:25):
that goats used to create their milk. So so you
milk your transgenic goat, and then you isolate out the
silk proteins and then you use those to create yourself. Meanwhile,
your goat never stops screaming and having nightmares for the
rest of its life. The goats reportedly or otherwise normal
(24:45):
happy goats. Well, and to be fair, we're talking about
proteins that you didn't have to process in order to
get the silk. You're not actually milking a goat and
spider silk is coming. Never stop screaming a spider goat. Yeah,
that's what I assumed upon first read. And that's not
that's not how it's okay, all right, fair enough, because
I don't want spider goats at all. Okay, it's swinging
(25:05):
from skyscrapers. But okay, I really find this equally awesome
and amazing and a little strange. Strange and I don't
know the disturbing is the right word. It's just so unusual,
Like it's amazing to me that people have come up
with these ideas and been able to implement them and
not turn out to be some sort of supervillain. That's
(25:28):
the amazing part to me. Jonathan. I advise you to
get used to what's weird, because reality is weird. That's true.
Just getting weird. And we're not done yet. Let's hit
me next weirder than you can possibly imagine. Hit me
with the next one. Oh you know what, I know
this next one because this is what I talked about
in the video, the idea of studying spider webs to
(25:50):
see what keeps them anchored to other surfaces in a
really sturdy way. Right, So this is not just the
material properties of the silk itself, but here we're sort
of looking at the architectural properties, the more macro architectural
properties of the webs disks they use to attach webs
to surfaces. Right. So it's an interesting question. It's one
(26:12):
that you don't necessarily think about, but occasionally it pays
to think about things like what makes sticky things sticky?
What makes glue sticky? What is it ultimately that creates
that bond that's making things stick together? And there are
different answers depending upon what material you're looking at, But
this is one of those things that you know, we
(26:33):
kind of take for granted, right, We're just glue is sticky.
But why Well, in this case the spider silk. The
reason why it's these attachment disks are so strong and
resilient and able to hold a web in place is
due to, uh, the geometry of those little disks. It's
actually imagine a spider web like a strand, and a
(26:56):
spider web as a thread, and then think of even
thinner threads that are in a particular geometric pattern that
are like a staple that are holding that strand in
place to whatever surface you're talking about, whether that's a
plant or your your a corner of of your house,
that kind of thing. Um and scientists looked very closely
(27:19):
at this and realized that this particular geometry and approach
was extremely um effective, and they wanted to see if
perhaps they could copy that, and so they ended up
using a a synthetic model. They ended up pulling out
a filament and then used uh, you know, artificial material.
(27:40):
This wasn't spider silk at this point, but used the
same approach in making these little manature sort of stitches
or staples as an attachment desk, a synthetic one, and
it works. They used electro spinning to create the fibers.
That's where you use electric charge to draw a solid
fiber out of a liquid, right, and in this case
it's an extreme really thin uh fiber. But and even
(28:03):
but even using even thinner fibers to attach it to
another surface. And you know, right now, there aren't a
ton of practical applications for it, but there are potential
practical applications for this kind of approach, including using it
in the medical field for things like binding broken bones
together where you can stitch them together with this stuff,
(28:24):
and it could make uh, the healing process much faster
for certain kinds of injuries, which I thought was you know,
I thought that that now, that's amazing. So I really
was excited when I read about this. Uh and this
is a fairly recent study that was was published, So um, yeah,
that's what kind of inspired the whole video in the
first place. Yeah, that, I do think that's really cool
(28:44):
for biomedical adhesives or even just stronger industrial adhesives. I mean,
there's always a good reason to make something real sticky.
Oh yeah, yeah. But I think there are a lot
of other really cool uses of spider silk and just
spider technology in general. One it I found was about
water collection. You ever seen a spiderweb outside stretch between
(29:06):
two branches after it's rained, or when it's dewey in
the morning and with droplets and it's kind of beautiful,
or like when that happens and then there's a sudden
freeze and you get a frozen spiderweb. I love it
because it means I'm less likely to walk through them, because,
like in the video, that's usually my experience of suddenly
becoming a ninja master, you know, flailing my arms around.
(29:29):
Everyone else just thinks I'm having some sort of crazy fit,
but it's just that I flogged through a spiderweb. Yeah. Well,
there's actually something to that, to this water retention property,
and we think that it might actually be useful. So
in two thousand nine, a group of Chinese scientists published
findings in the journal Nature about the properties of spider
(29:49):
silk with regard to water. So, spiderwebs are very good
at collecting water from the air based on tiny changes
in the structure of the silk in the presence of moisture.
They have all these little tiny fibers sort of poking
out from the main drag line silk, and those can
change their shape with response to water, and what that
(30:10):
ends up doing is collecting lots of water along the
length of the web. So there is debate about whether
the water collecting ability of the web is actually a
trait that's been selected for, like whether that's something the
spiders want and that's giving them a survival advantage, or
whether it's just kind of a side effect of what
webs do. Anyway, we don't really know for sure which
(30:31):
one it is, of course, for the practical application that's
moved right. So in any case, Yeah, the researchers were
able to create artificial structures that mimic the water collecting
properties of the spider webs. And it's worth noting that
something like this could be really useful in basically any
situation where moisture is precious, or where it would be
advantageous to collect moisture from the air, say in a
(30:53):
very dry climate cool. And then there is this other
story that I like the idea of using spider web
technology to make windows safer for birds, you know, one
of the I don't know. I'm sure we've all had
the experience of hearing a bird collide with a glass
pane of glass. It happened during my very first job interview. Ever,
(31:15):
it was very upsetting for everyone involved. Yeah, that that
leaves an impression that literally, I mean certainly on certainly
it's very sad actually, uh, And I you know, I've
seen this happen uh a few times myself. I am
a soft heart hearted person, so for me it's immediately
a blow, a little bit traumatized, and I mean obviously
(31:35):
for the bird as well. So one way to potentially
head that off is to incorporate some reflective material inside
the window that is reflective to birds but not reflective
to human beings. You see, spiderwebs reflect ultra violet light,
which birds are able to see but we can't. It's
one of those reasons why if we're walking towards a
(31:57):
spider web and these strands are thin enough, we may
not know to sit and walk right into it. But
birds are not going to do that. They're going to
see the reflection of ultra violet light, assuming that there's
a light source shining in that area. So that means
that if you were able to incorporate a similar approach
and and you know, move some ultra violet material reflective
(32:17):
material into the material of the window itself, you can
make it visible to birds while still remaining practically invisible
to humans. Uh From I understand, most of the glass
panes that are made this way, if you're really close
and you're looking at it from different angles, you can
sort of see where that those those patterns have been
made in the glass, because it's not like it's a
(32:40):
solid pain of ultra violet reflective material. It's more like
a pattern that birds can see and thus veer away
from in time instead of colliding with that that pane
of glass. But I thought that was really cool too,
just this idea of, Hey, you know, why don't birds
fly into into webs more frequently? Ah ha, here's the
reason why. How are we incorporate that into the design
(33:01):
of stuff we make? Mhm, there's there's lots more things
that we can do with with spider stuff. I mean,
I mean, you know there's um. Okay. So, so it
turns out that the that protein that I was talking
about earlier, if you use that to create a powder,
it can go in stuff like shampoos and cosmetics to
make your skin and hair feel smoother. That that is
(33:24):
currently in use today. Joe, you were making a really
terrific face in response to when I want to feel
fresh and smooth, I rubbed spiders over every inch of
my body. Um. Sounding more and more like it's a
doctor weird segment at the beginning of an aquitine hunger
force cartoon or um. Related to the biomedical properties that
(33:46):
Jonathan was talking about earlier, you can use it to
help heal wounds. Um. It is spider silk has in fact,
traditionally historically been used as kind of a wound covering
in the field. You can coat implants with it, which
will hypothetically reduce the body's immune reaction to so you
could you could reduce the chances of your body rejecting something,
(34:08):
or use it to use spider silk to manufacture artificial tendons,
you know, good and springy and and again. Yeah, uh
and hey, it's conductivity of heat, as it turns out,
is similar to that of copper, but it's only one
seventh is dnse, So it could be really useful in
like heat exchange systems like h vacts or electronics or cookware. Yeah,
(34:30):
I actually read about that that you might be able
to use spider silk to cool your computer in the future.
You know, this is really amazing stuff, and it's why
we wanted to specifically focus on spiders because while bio
memetics in general is a fascinating, which fascinating field, just
the fact that spider silk it has provided so much inspiration,
(34:53):
is a great example of why it's important for us
to pursue all levels of science, not just in engineering
or biology, but you know, everything, because they feed off
of one another. So yeah, we're glad that we were
able to dedicate a couple of episodes to this. I'm
sure we'll return back to it because it's impossible to,
you know, just say oh, well, over and done. Let's
(35:13):
move on, because I think biology will continue to be
a source of inspiration and we'll we'll see other examples
that will need to be talked about. So if you
guys out there have any examples you think we should
chat about in future episodes, or perhaps there's just some
other topic that you really would like us to tackle,
let us know. You can let us on Facebook, Twitter,
or Google Plus. Our handle it all three is FW thinking.
(35:37):
We look forward to hearing from you, and you'll hear
from us again really soon. For more on this topic
in the future of technology, visits Forward Thinking dot Com,
(36:00):
brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking,
the podcast that looks at the future and says, spider
he is our hero. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick. Hey, everybody, quick,
(00:24):
Spider check. Spider checks? Are the spiders on your body?
I don't think so. I've got three ticks, but no spiders.
I'm not a record free I'm just kidding. I don't
only ticks, I have a verbal what what so? Uh? Yeah, yeah, No,
no spider spiders on your body. You couldn't find any
(00:44):
of mine either, Which is that that's something of a comfort.
Why why do you ask? Well, I just we had
to establish that before we could move on so quick.
Round the table. How do we feel about spiders? Generally
in favor? There are a couple of exceptions that wig
me out, Lauren. I like them, like them, I do.
I find them fascinating and cute. I appreciate them very
(01:05):
much cognitively, but I think that they are the physical
embodiment of fear. I I am. I am designated as
the person who takes care of any sort of spider
incident in our home. Spider incidents also any other type
of creepy crawley sort of thing. So spiders are just
(01:26):
one form I would say bugs, But of course then
I would offend all people who are true lovers of spiders,
which are of course arachnids. Uh. Yeah. So, but most
of the time I just capture them. I do a
capture and release program because I think spiders are incredibly helpful,
so I don't I don't like to extinguish their little lives. Well, yeah,
if you don't like your entire body being covered in insects,
(01:49):
you should appreciate spiders certainly. Uh. And I not being
entirely covered in insects Another fun fact. Yeah, I get
pedantic about the arachnid distinction too. I you know, I
just can't deal with it. A while back, there was
an AP and Associated Press story going out. There was
just some little fluff piece about there were some children
(02:10):
visiting the office of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and
it said that the governor smashed a spider in front
of the students. That was the story, but it called
it a spider, and then a paragraph later referred to
it as an insect but not the same thing. That
that's like saying, um, a mammal and a bony fish.
(02:35):
They're they're like separated by that much distinction. I think
the headline show should have been politician Christie in between
bridge uh bridge conspiracy theories, squishes, a possible insects slash
a acted details to follow when you get more on
this story. Uh yeah, this is complicates or or okay,
(02:57):
So here here are two specific types of spiders that
do give me a little bit of Willie's when to
look at them, or at least pictures of them. I
have not seen either spider moving around in person, but
you've probably eaten both of them. Well, I don't know.
The curved spiny spider is more is native to Asia,
and I have not yet made my way there. That
doesn't mean that I couldn't have possibly encountered one some
(03:19):
other way, but pieces of your food somewhere it could be. Yeah,
curved spider, that's the actual name, curved spiny. And we
have a picture in our notes, which I realize not
terribly helpful for you listeners out there. But the picture
it looks almost like the body shape is almost triangular.
And then uh, in the at the base of the
(03:40):
abdomen are these long horns that extend outward. And that's
actually a female. The males do not have the horns. Yeah,
it's a little bit like a like a wishbone with
a spider attached. I was going to say, it looks
like Tim Curry and Legend, right, Yeah, in spider form, right,
I do not want spider him Curry. No, it only
(04:02):
it only choose insects, not scenery. Then I have the
Ravine trapdoor spider, which you know, Joe, before the podcast started,
you said, this thing doesn't even look real. It does
look kind of weird because if you were to view
the spider, uh, like like, let's say it's just crawling
around on the ground. You were reviewing it from above,
it looks like someone has cut it's abdomen in half,
(04:24):
like it's it's just a flat ended abdomen as opposed
to a rounded one. Yeah. In the back of its abdomen,
it's just this flat disc with the design that looks
like one of the Dharma initiative from Yeah, it looks
kind of like it could be a poker chip or
a coin even And and the thing is, this is
a trapdoor spider. It digs a burrow and it crawls
(04:44):
down in it. So if you were to actually see one,
you would be more likely to see it's it's rear end,
that flat rear end, and think, hey, that looks neat
I should pick that up, and then immediately regret your decision.
These are native to the state we live in. These
are native to Georgia. And if you've never seen a
picture of one, like I said, if you look at
what it looks like, it's fake. In fact, I remember
(05:05):
seeing comments on a blog post about these things where
one of the well one of them said, no, that's
a that's a spider that was injured by being cut
in half and uh and then it healed. You should
be ashamed of yourself. And there's like, no, dude, this
is actually the way these things look in real life. Well,
we'll try to remember to post some post some pictures
on social Yeah, when this this podcast goes live at
(05:27):
any rate, Yeah, there there's some spiders that kind of
wake us out. But we're not just here to talk
about the future of getting the willis. We're here to
talk about science and technology. So I think we should
discuss how spiders fit into our future, specifically how they're
going to be inspiring technology that matters to us. So
we're talking about bio mimetics again, that's right. So, yeah,
(05:50):
we've established that spiders are very important to us in
a natural way absolute cleaning up insects in the ecosystem.
But by looking at natural designs that we find in
the organic kingdoms, we can actually see, hey, you know,
nature has been working on this design for a long time.
There's no shame in sort of getting some inspiration from
(06:11):
what's already been done. Sure, especially when you know you
get something as completely effective as, for example, spider silk. Yeah. Now,
this is the main focus of this podcast is spider silk.
Now we're not saying that spiders don't have a myriad
of other incredibly amazing attributes and features, but spider silk
alone is phenomenal stuff. Yeah, spider silk is i will say,
(06:34):
completely amazing. So it's very tough and ductile. It's able
to withstand enormous stretching pressure before it breaks. So according
to some accounts, spider silk you can stretch it out
by about of its length without its snap. That is
absolutely amazing, and we talk about ten style strength, which
is that ability to withstand that pulling force before it snaps.
(06:57):
And the fact that this has such elasticity makes it
an incredible material. Well yeah, and it's the elasticity paired
with how strong it is for its weight and size.
Uh So, I was actually reading a really funny paper online.
So if y'all seen Spiderman two, yeah, yeah, okay, so
Sam Raimi, Spiderman's not some other Spider Man. This isn't
(07:19):
the one where he disco dances down the show. No, No,
Tony McGuire, Oh my godness, Molina as Cock. Right, brilliant, brilliant,
uh performance, I would say, right, wonderful. So Doc Cock
is fighting with Spider Man on top of a train
and he basically he hits the switch and throws the
train out of control. You know, there's no breaks and
(07:40):
it's barreling down towards the end of the line. Right,
And since Spider Man is not Superman, he actually wants
to save people and not just let rampant destruction rain
down upon poor average mortals. Right, I think you're referring
to Man of Steel, not Superman in general. But yeah,
Spider Man cares about people. So he wants to stop
the train, right, right, How's he going to do it? Well,
(08:01):
he tries a few things. He tries to sort of
brace against the tracks, and that doesn't work. So then
he gets the idea. He puts his body out on
the front of the train and he shoots spider webs
out into you know, he can shoot the webs out
of his hands, and he shoots them out so that
they attached to the buildings he's passing by as he goes,
and this forms a kind of V shaped uh rubber
(08:23):
band sort of of tensile strength to press back against
the force of the train as it barrels forward. And
spoiler alert, he does manage to stop the trains. It
would have been kind of a bummer if if all
of his efforts had failed and that people just plummeted
to their death or something. Sure, but you know, many
times in superhero movies, superheroes do things that don't necessarily
(08:44):
have anything to do with physics at all whatsoever. Right,
So could this actually be something Let's say that let's
say that we were able to scale up the Spider's silk.
Is that even remotely possible? Yeah? Based on a paper
I read. Yes, I was actually reading this paper in
the Journal of Physics Special Topics, which is an undergraduate
(09:06):
journal run by the Department of Physics and Astronomy at
the University of Lester. And by the way, this journal
is delightful. I can't wait to read more of it.
I've never discovered it before. But it's obviously not going
to be like a top resource for ground breaking research,
but it's more full of kind of fun and weird topics,
like science fiction based things. And you know what, if
(09:27):
we wanted to offset global warming by moving the Earth
farther away from the Sun, how much farther would we
have to push it back and it's radius. See, these
are cool questions. I mean, obviously there are no practical
answers here because that's not something we could do. It's
all just kind of estimating. But using what knowledge we
do have to come up with interesting answers to weird questions,
(09:48):
that's fantastic. Uh, And so I really like it in anyway.
This one paper was called doing Whatever a Spider Can
by Brian Forster in Stone, and they calculated the force
that would have been required to stop a train as
Spider Man does in the movie and then they compared
that to the resistance force that could have been created
by real spider webs assuming proportional scaling, and they concluded
(10:10):
in the end of the paper that if Spider Man's
webs were proportionally as strong as real spider silk, they
actually should have been sufficient to stop the train as
depicted in the movie. See this is incredible. I mean,
it's just it does demonstrate how amazing spider silk really is.
And also this is you know, that was key to
the formation of the mythology of Spider Man. I mean,
(10:32):
the whole point was that the silk that Peter Parker
creates is supposed to mimic what spider webs are naturally
capable of doing. And even back when when Spider Man
was being created, everyone was pretty aware of the fact
that spider silk is really strong stuff, particularly when you
take into consideration how thin that those those individual strands
(10:53):
tend to be. So I mean, it's it's great to
see that not only was this sort of common knowledge, uh,
it not only did it bear out, but it shows
that this was actually not necessarily plausible, but a possibility.
If you were able to scale that up, it would
in fact, have been sufficient to stop that out of
control car. Yeah, so I was interested in finding out, well,
(11:16):
what is the toughest known spider silk. It's actually not
just the toughest snow and spider silk, but it's the
toughest known biomaterial. It's a form of spider silk that
comes from the Darwin's bark spider, the Carorostrius Darwinnie that's
a Madagascar and it's a spider that makes silk that's
up to ten times tougher than kevlar fibers. And toughness
(11:39):
is the amount of kinetic energy the material is able
to withstand without fracturing. In a two thousand ten paper
in pl Os One, the author's discussed how they identified
the spiders a good candidate for especially tough silk by
observing how it created gigantic orb webs that were like
up to two point eight square meters, which is more
than thirty point one square feet. Is terrifyingly enormously gigantic
(12:04):
spiderwebs suspended over water sources like streams and rivers, So
you can imagine like seals and deer catch the flying fish. Now,
I think they were catching for catching insects coming up
off the water, and the authors point out that silk
of this kind would be a great inspiration for incredibly
tough bio mimetic materials. So they are all kinds of
(12:24):
things we could use spider silk for if we had
enough of it, in situations where we need materials that
are very light and very strong and very elastic. Okay,
so this has enormous potential. But I think that, I mean,
clearly what all of us are thinking about here first
is clothing. Yeah. Yeah, you can make you a really
really lightweight bullet proof vest or something like that, or
(12:47):
you can make it I mean like fashion. I mean
I want a spider dress. Well, you're in luck, and
all you need to do is break into a museum
and steal it, because there has actually recently been had
an entire garment, actually two whole garments made from spider silk.
So in two thousand nine, Simon Pierce, who is a
(13:07):
British art historian and textile expert, and Nicholas Godly, and
American fashion designer, revealed the result of this textile experiment
they'd been working on while they were both living on
the island of Madagascar. Again in the same place as
the Darwin's bark spider. And this was a spider silk cloth.
Now it wasn't made by the Darwin spark spider. It
(13:27):
was made by golden orb spiders of Madagascar, and they've
been known to produce very brightly colored yellow silk, this
beautiful golden hue. So the project started in two thousand four.
They had the help of a team of seventy workers
who collected wild spiders for the project, and then another
dozen workers who harvested the silk with hand powered extraction machines.
(13:55):
The silk extraction machinery was actually inspired by a similar
system more than a hundred years old, which the French
missionary Jacob Paul Kembaway used to harvest filaments for spider
silk textiles around the turn of the last centuries, around
the year nineteen hundred in Madagascar. Um. But coming back
to this project, the recent one, over a period of
(14:18):
four years that they were able to spin the silk
into thread and produce an eleven foot long by four
ft wide piece of cloth out of spider silk. It's
bright yellow. It's kind of strange to imagine handling. I
just imagine incredibly exhausted spiders being very very proud of
(14:41):
their work. Yeah, you you'd be pretty on target there,
at least about the exhausted part. So producing spider silk
is not easy. So we can make silk from silkworms.
That's not that much of a problem. Well not not
if you're a person. But have you ever asked a
silkworm how they feel about? It's true, no one knows
what it's like when you're a silk worm. Well you know.
(15:02):
But but silkworm are relatively um docile creatures. I mean,
they basically just hang out being worms and produced the
silk stuff. Spiders, as it turns out, are less friendly,
aus especially to each other. So spiders are cannibals. They're
also really aggressive, aren't they in territorial while some are
(15:22):
And yeah, you can't pin spiders up together because after
the work is done each night, they'll eat each other.
So apparently Peers and Godly tried to create a reusable
spider farm at first, but um I wrote an article
for the Economist where Peers explained that they'd have a
collection of five spiders that would cannibalize itself down to
(15:44):
fifty or so over the course of a few days.
You know, I think if if Ford had to work
with these kind of problems, we never would have had
an assembly line. Yeah, just say if the machinery ate itself.
So apparently, in in the more final version, the project
involved constantly releasing spiders and then catching new ones. It's
(16:07):
a very work intensive project. Exactly. Apparently they ended up
using more than a million wild spiders for the production
of this one cloth. One million, sixty three thousand to
be exactly. You gotta figure some of those were recaptures.
Some of the spiders are like not again. So the
(16:27):
cloth eventually went on display in the American Museum of
Natural History in two thousand nine. Uh, And people say
it has really unique tactile characteristics, like it feels vaguely sticky,
and that the cloth threads are both very very light
and very very strong. I don't think I want sticky clothing.
I worked pretty hard at my clothing not being sticky.
(16:50):
Somebody had to wear it because they didn't stop at
this one shawl. They created the first piece that they
created a cape after that. Yeah, they made a cape.
They made a cap up and they made a lady
wear it. And there are pictures at her. There are
pictures of her wearing it, and she did they make her?
I don't know if they personally did. I assume she
(17:11):
was some kind of model. I'm sure there are pictures
of this one particular woman on the internet wearing this
spider silk cape. She looks very serious, as she looks
very regal. But you know, in every photograph she's thinking,
you get this miracle of nature off my skin. I'm
looking at it right now, and uh, you see what
I'm saying. She seems to have the same same sort
(17:33):
of expression of disdain that most fashionable models are are
are told to cultivate. I'm not saying that they have
disdain like you're not good enough to wear this? Yeah, yeah,
you know what, I can't read the expression anymore. Beyond that, Well,
if she's out there listening, you can ride into us
and tell us what it was like to wear that
spider cape. Yeah, let us know. It's a very specific
(17:57):
call out there. But okay, so spider silk has amazing properties,
but this project shows how difficult it is to mass
produce useful amounts of it. I mean, obviously we're gonna
have trouble coming up with a million spiders every time
you want to make a pair of socks. So so
clearly getting spiders to make this silk for us is
(18:17):
not the most practical approach, especially if we want to
talk about mass production, right right, especially for something like clothing,
which I do want to point out this was a
viewer question from YouTube, actually Mr Richard Miller and I
and I mentioned the full name because that is his
full YouTube name. UM asked us about this on on
YouTube and our video about bio memetics, So thank you
(18:40):
so much for writing that question in Richard. Yeah, so,
so spider silk from spiders probably not the practical solution,
not feasible at all, but again, as we said, very useful.
So is there a way we can make useful amounts
of spider silk or something very much like spider silk
without milking a million spiders. Well, we're working on it.
(19:01):
The short answer at this very current point in time
is not really but all right, so uh so, some
researchers have created spider silk from silkworms. They they genetically
engineered the silkworms, which produce hella more silk than spiders do,
to create stuff that is not quite as strong as
actual spider silk. It's it's sort of a hybrid between
(19:22):
the two. Still pretty cool. So this way you get
you get the benefit of being able to produce the
silk without the concern of the product producers eating one
another at the end of every day or biting you. Right, Okay,
that's fair, and and more silk than you would from
the spiders overall, uh, fewer, fewer silkworms or spiders involved. Yes,
(19:44):
you can also code bacteria to create spider silk. Well, bacteria, bacteria, Well,
they're not creating the silk. There's there's a few steps
in this process here. First you take and or engineer
a gene that encodes the production of spider silk proteins. Okay,
and you pop that gene into some easily programmable bacteria,
like for example equally. Um. Yeah, it's it's nasty, but
(20:07):
it's one of those that we know a lot about. Yeah. Yeah,
you can just kind of scrape out part of its
genetic code and be like here, instead of doing this
other thing, we want you to produce this protein. Um.
Then you must about with the bacteria is metabolism to
give it the right building blocks to create the silk
proteins and bam, you've got we little silk factories. But okay,
(20:28):
wait a minute, that just sounds like that would leave
you with the protein, right right, Yeah, So that's that's
the first part. Once you've got this raw protein material,
you need to purify it into silk fiber and then
spin the fibers into the actual tensile silk strands. Um.
Part of this involves stretching the fiber to align its molecules,
which is possibly best done using a mechanical actuator, which
(20:52):
is like a little spider silk taffy pole. I didn't
think it was possible for me to get more disturbed
as this podcast, and yet somehow it's And I don't
even find spiders to be that ikey or anything, but
this this is weird. With start with Tim Curry from
Legend Spider, and we just go downhill from well that's
all right, Well, I'm sure, I'm sure that it's gonna
(21:14):
turn around and by the end of this I'm just
going to be singing the praises of spiders. Well, are
you ready for something really silly? Sure, hit me with it.
What if instead of spider silk we used spiber silk. So,
so we flipped the d around it. That's essentially the process.
What is spiber silk. So one of the companies that's
(21:34):
that's working with bacteria to create spider silk is called
Spiber b e R. So the b being from bacteria
I would imagine or something. Um, but they're they're talking there.
I mean, they've got these grand plans that they're talking about,
like building cars out of spider Shut up and skeptical
(21:57):
of that. Well, okay, so here's the like over on
tech stuff. We recently did a pair of episodes about
carbon fiber and it's it's really impressive stuff. It's some
like six lighter than steel, but five times is strong.
And Spiber is claiming that they're artificial spider silk. Spiber
silk maybe as as strong as steel and lighter even
(22:18):
than carbon fiber. Alright, So, and of course lighter cars
means that the the engine has to work less to
move the car, so it ends up being a more
efficient vehicle in the grand scheme of things. Okay, now
I want to apologize and back off on my skepticism little. Obviously,
I guess they're not talking about making every part of
the car out of No. No, I imagine like the
(22:39):
engine would still be made of engine, but some parts
of it would be made the body that chases. It's
it's why do I never pronounce that? Correct? I go
through like nine pronunciations in my head. None of them
is pronounced. So yeah, No, the chassis, the body of
the car, like those elements will be made of this
(23:00):
bider silk material we talk about. When you talk about
carbon fiber, you're not really talking about a body that's
made out of fibers. You're talking about a reinforced material
that has these fibers that produce that that resiliency and
decrease decrease in in weight as well. So some sort
of thing. You're also talking about using fibers to spin
(23:20):
a cloth and then reinforcing that cloth with a resin,
which I imagine is the process that they are imagining. Right.
It sets it into a specific shape and then it
does not move out of that shape. You know, you
can apply heat or whatever, and it's gonna it's going
to retain the shape that you gave it due to
the resins that you've added in the process. Okay, so
is there anything else we can use to make artificial
(23:41):
spider fiber other than fiber bacteria. Oh yeah, plants, tobacco
and alfalfa in particular seem like decent candidates for for
growing this protein. Um or hate goats, of course, I
mean goats. I mean if goats simulator has taught me nothing,
it's taught me that a goat's tongue is at least
(24:03):
as sticky as a spider web. Wait, this is goats
with a tea, not gobes. Not no, no, there's not
goat bacteria. We're talking about goats, all right, So you
guys might actually remember this one from from the headlines
of the Internet. Some researchers introduced this gene that you know,
encodes the production of spider silk proteins into the sequence
(24:25):
that goats used to create their milk. So so you
milk your transgenic goat, and then you isolate out the
silk proteins and then you use those to create yourself. Meanwhile,
your goat never stops screaming and having nightmares for the
rest of its life. The goats reportedly or otherwise normal
(24:45):
happy goats. Well, and to be fair, we're talking about
proteins that you didn't have to process in order to
get the silk. You're not actually milking a goat and
spider silk is coming. Never stop screaming a spider goat. Yeah,
that's what I assumed upon first read. And that's not
that's not how it's okay, all right, fair enough, because
I don't want spider goats at all. Okay, it's swinging
(25:05):
from skyscrapers. But okay, I really find this equally awesome
and amazing and a little strange. Strange and I don't
know the disturbing is the right word. It's just so unusual,
Like it's amazing to me that people have come up
with these ideas and been able to implement them and
not turn out to be some sort of supervillain. That's
(25:28):
the amazing part to me. Jonathan. I advise you to
get used to what's weird, because reality is weird. That's true.
Just getting weird. And we're not done yet. Let's hit
me next weirder than you can possibly imagine. Hit me
with the next one. Oh you know what, I know
this next one because this is what I talked about
in the video, the idea of studying spider webs to
(25:50):
see what keeps them anchored to other surfaces in a
really sturdy way. Right, So this is not just the
material properties of the silk itself, but here we're sort
of looking at the architectural properties, the more macro architectural
properties of the webs disks they use to attach webs
to surfaces. Right. So it's an interesting question. It's one
(26:12):
that you don't necessarily think about, but occasionally it pays
to think about things like what makes sticky things sticky?
What makes glue sticky? What is it ultimately that creates
that bond that's making things stick together? And there are
different answers depending upon what material you're looking at, But
this is one of those things that you know, we
(26:33):
kind of take for granted, right, We're just glue is sticky.
But why Well, in this case the spider silk. The
reason why it's these attachment disks are so strong and
resilient and able to hold a web in place is
due to, uh, the geometry of those little disks. It's
actually imagine a spider web like a strand, and a
(26:56):
spider web as a thread, and then think of even
thinner threads that are in a particular geometric pattern that
are like a staple that are holding that strand in
place to whatever surface you're talking about, whether that's a
plant or your your a corner of of your house,
that kind of thing. Um and scientists looked very closely
(27:19):
at this and realized that this particular geometry and approach
was extremely um effective, and they wanted to see if
perhaps they could copy that, and so they ended up
using a a synthetic model. They ended up pulling out
a filament and then used uh, you know, artificial material.
(27:40):
This wasn't spider silk at this point, but used the
same approach in making these little manature sort of stitches
or staples as an attachment desk, a synthetic one, and
it works. They used electro spinning to create the fibers.
That's where you use electric charge to draw a solid
fiber out of a liquid, right, and in this case
it's an extreme really thin uh fiber. But and even
(28:03):
but even using even thinner fibers to attach it to
another surface. And you know, right now, there aren't a
ton of practical applications for it, but there are potential
practical applications for this kind of approach, including using it
in the medical field for things like binding broken bones
together where you can stitch them together with this stuff,
(28:24):
and it could make uh, the healing process much faster
for certain kinds of injuries, which I thought was you know,
I thought that that now, that's amazing. So I really
was excited when I read about this. Uh and this
is a fairly recent study that was was published, So um, yeah,
that's what kind of inspired the whole video in the
first place. Yeah, that, I do think that's really cool
(28:44):
for biomedical adhesives or even just stronger industrial adhesives. I mean,
there's always a good reason to make something real sticky.
Oh yeah, yeah. But I think there are a lot
of other really cool uses of spider silk and just
spider technology in general. One it I found was about
water collection. You ever seen a spiderweb outside stretch between
(29:06):
two branches after it's rained, or when it's dewey in
the morning and with droplets and it's kind of beautiful,
or like when that happens and then there's a sudden
freeze and you get a frozen spiderweb. I love it
because it means I'm less likely to walk through them, because,
like in the video, that's usually my experience of suddenly
becoming a ninja master, you know, flailing my arms around.
(29:29):
Everyone else just thinks I'm having some sort of crazy fit,
but it's just that I flogged through a spiderweb. Yeah. Well,
there's actually something to that, to this water retention property,
and we think that it might actually be useful. So
in two thousand nine, a group of Chinese scientists published
findings in the journal Nature about the properties of spider
(29:49):
silk with regard to water. So, spiderwebs are very good
at collecting water from the air based on tiny changes
in the structure of the silk in the presence of moisture.
They have all these little tiny fibers sort of poking
out from the main drag line silk, and those can
change their shape with response to water, and what that
(30:10):
ends up doing is collecting lots of water along the
length of the web. So there is debate about whether
the water collecting ability of the web is actually a
trait that's been selected for, like whether that's something the
spiders want and that's giving them a survival advantage, or
whether it's just kind of a side effect of what
webs do. Anyway, we don't really know for sure which
(30:31):
one it is, of course, for the practical application that's
moved right. So in any case, Yeah, the researchers were
able to create artificial structures that mimic the water collecting
properties of the spider webs. And it's worth noting that
something like this could be really useful in basically any
situation where moisture is precious, or where it would be
advantageous to collect moisture from the air, say in a
(30:53):
very dry climate cool. And then there is this other
story that I like the idea of using spider web
technology to make windows safer for birds, you know, one
of the I don't know. I'm sure we've all had
the experience of hearing a bird collide with a glass
pane of glass. It happened during my very first job interview. Ever,
(31:15):
it was very upsetting for everyone involved. Yeah, that that
leaves an impression that literally, I mean certainly on certainly
it's very sad actually, uh, And I you know, I've
seen this happen uh a few times myself. I am
a soft heart hearted person, so for me it's immediately
a blow, a little bit traumatized, and I mean obviously
(31:35):
for the bird as well. So one way to potentially
head that off is to incorporate some reflective material inside
the window that is reflective to birds but not reflective
to human beings. You see, spiderwebs reflect ultra violet light,
which birds are able to see but we can't. It's
one of those reasons why if we're walking towards a
(31:57):
spider web and these strands are thin enough, we may
not know to sit and walk right into it. But
birds are not going to do that. They're going to
see the reflection of ultra violet light, assuming that there's
a light source shining in that area. So that means
that if you were able to incorporate a similar approach
and and you know, move some ultra violet material reflective
(32:17):
material into the material of the window itself, you can
make it visible to birds while still remaining practically invisible
to humans. Uh From I understand, most of the glass
panes that are made this way, if you're really close
and you're looking at it from different angles, you can
sort of see where that those those patterns have been
made in the glass, because it's not like it's a
(32:40):
solid pain of ultra violet reflective material. It's more like
a pattern that birds can see and thus veer away
from in time instead of colliding with that that pane
of glass. But I thought that was really cool too,
just this idea of, Hey, you know, why don't birds
fly into into webs more frequently? Ah ha, here's the
reason why. How are we incorporate that into the design
(33:01):
of stuff we make? Mhm, there's there's lots more things
that we can do with with spider stuff. I mean,
I mean, you know there's um. Okay. So, so it
turns out that the that protein that I was talking
about earlier, if you use that to create a powder,
it can go in stuff like shampoos and cosmetics to
make your skin and hair feel smoother. That that is
(33:24):
currently in use today. Joe, you were making a really
terrific face in response to when I want to feel
fresh and smooth, I rubbed spiders over every inch of
my body. Um. Sounding more and more like it's a
doctor weird segment at the beginning of an aquitine hunger
force cartoon or um. Related to the biomedical properties that
(33:46):
Jonathan was talking about earlier, you can use it to
help heal wounds. Um. It is spider silk has in fact,
traditionally historically been used as kind of a wound covering
in the field. You can coat implants with it, which
will hypothetically reduce the body's immune reaction to so you
could you could reduce the chances of your body rejecting something,
(34:08):
or use it to use spider silk to manufacture artificial tendons,
you know, good and springy and and again. Yeah, uh
and hey, it's conductivity of heat, as it turns out,
is similar to that of copper, but it's only one
seventh is dnse, So it could be really useful in
like heat exchange systems like h vacts or electronics or cookware. Yeah,
(34:30):
I actually read about that that you might be able
to use spider silk to cool your computer in the future.
You know, this is really amazing stuff, and it's why
we wanted to specifically focus on spiders because while bio
memetics in general is a fascinating, which fascinating field, just
the fact that spider silk it has provided so much inspiration,
(34:53):
is a great example of why it's important for us
to pursue all levels of science, not just in engineering
or biology, but you know, everything, because they feed off
of one another. So yeah, we're glad that we were
able to dedicate a couple of episodes to this. I'm
sure we'll return back to it because it's impossible to,
you know, just say oh, well, over and done. Let's
(35:13):
move on, because I think biology will continue to be
a source of inspiration and we'll we'll see other examples
that will need to be talked about. So if you
guys out there have any examples you think we should
chat about in future episodes, or perhaps there's just some
other topic that you really would like us to tackle,
let us know. You can let us on Facebook, Twitter,
or Google Plus. Our handle it all three is FW thinking.
(35:37):
We look forward to hearing from you, and you'll hear
from us again really soon. For more on this topic
in the future of technology, visits Forward Thinking dot Com,
(36:00):
brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,
Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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