3.18.26

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome. This is Marsha for Radioie and today I will
be reading National Geographic magazine dated March twenty twenty six,
which is donated by the publisher as a reminder. Radioie
is a reading service intended for people who are blind
or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
printed material. Please join me now for the first article

(00:22):
titled Unlocking Nature's Miracle by Rowan Jacobson. An organic material
that is five times stronger than steel. It exists in
the natural world, but has historically been impossible for us
to manufacture. Now, thanks to breakthroughs in genetic engineering, we've
created something very close super silk, and it's poised to

(00:46):
upgrade for more than our clothing. Somewhere in Michigan, ten
thousand silkworms are spinning the future of super materials. They
labor in the thick air of a warm, humid warehouse,
pulling a sticky white strand from a gland in their
face and weaving it into a cocoon the size of
a grape. Since they were first domesticated in China thousands

(01:09):
of years ago, their silk has been used to make
the world's finest fabric, but these silkworms aren't like the
millions that came before. They are spinning spider's silk, or
something close to it. Pound for pound, spider silk, which
is tantalized scientists for decades, combined strength and elasticity unlike
anything else natural or artificial, five times stronger than steel

(01:33):
by weight, but completely organic. It's the stuff of superheroes,
says fioranzo Omenetto, director of the Silk Lab at Tufts
University in Massachusetts. It exists in the same rarefied space
as graphene and kevlar, human made creations with similarly extraordinary

(01:54):
physical properties, but those can require synthetic chemicals to manufacture.
Spider silk could do what they do, possibly better and organically.
That in turn has led to a steady stream of height.
Spider silk, if mass produced, could unlock everything from improved
bulletproof vests to ultra light jet planes to next generation

(02:16):
vaccine delivery, if only we could crack the code. Spiders, though,
are cannibalistic when forced to live together, making them neither
domesticable nor easily scalable. But in the past few years
everything's changed. Those spider silk spinning silkworms all genetically modified

(02:37):
live at the Lansing, Michigan Research Center of biotech firm
Craig Biocraft Laboratories. Craig is just one of several companies
around the world that have made breakthroughs in manufacturing spider
silk or a very close analog. Those silkworms can't quite
match spider silk's superhero level physical properties just yet, but

(02:59):
there is enough spider gene in the mix to give
their silk fibers special qualities. Other companies have charted a
different path, one less reliant on worms munching mulberry leaf cake,
but with the same goal. The goal is to mimic
and eventually surpass the performance of natural spider silk, and
then push it toward real world applications, says Wenbo, who

(03:24):
a spider silk expert at Southwest University in Central China.
We're getting incredibly close. For the first time, the long
hyped super material dubbed super silk seems to be real.
But the start ups and genetic engineers who've spent years
and millions of dollars pursuing this holy grail are now
having to reckon with a question they'd been able to ignore.

(03:47):
In the quest for super silk at scale. Once you
make us super material, what do you do with it?
The answers, it turns out, aren't as obviously as they'd imagined.
Spider self is, by any measure, one of nature's most
miraculous structures. Large orb weaver spiders have been known to
build webs that trap birds and bats. It may take

(04:10):
a simple swipe of the human hand to brush through
a spider web in the woods, but a hypothetically massive
web with strands the thickness of a pencil could stop
a seven forty seven in flight. Spider silk seemingly magical
capabilities derived from two singular factors, special proteins known as spidroins,

(04:30):
and the way those spidroins are spun into intricate fibers.
The spidroins are composed of thousands of amino acids in
a long chain, mixing both positive and negative electrical charges,
as well as hydrophobic and hydrophilic sections, allowing them to
stretch like an accordion while wrapping tightly around each other.

(04:55):
Spiders then bundle those proteins into a cabled matrix of
fibers that cling to each other, so tenaciously that almost
nothing can break them. Threshing insects don't stand a chance.
Spider silk's potential has been apparent for centuries. Ancient Greeks
and Romans applied webs as wound poultices, while Solomon Islanders

(05:16):
used web silk as fishing lures, but the first attempt
to commercialize the material didn't start until the late eating hundreds,
when Jesuit missionaries stationed in Madagascar took note of the
island's golden orb weaver spiders and the prolific amount of
silk they produced. With the help of local children, the
missionaries devised a system to immobilize the spiders and cokes

(05:40):
about five hundred yards of silk from each. All that
effort yielded a stunning golden yellow bed canopy that made
a stir at the nineteen hundred Paris Expo, but not
much more. The process was too labor intensive, and the
spiders had a nasty habit of eating each other. But
spider silk continued to inspire why settle for the physical

(06:02):
limits of cotton wool or regular silk when better options
merely required ingenuity. In the nineteen thirties, inspired by the
architecture of silk. DuPont developed nylon. The first commercially viable
synthetic fiber. Kevlar fiber, arrived in nineteen sixty six, its
strong lattice of hydrogen bonds making it nearly unbreakable. Graphene,

(06:26):
whose one item thick sheets of honey combed carbon make
it the strongest material in the world, was created in
two thousand three. But while these synthetic fibers have revolutionized
multiple industries, from clothing and cook wear to aerospace and electronics,
they're dogged by their artificiality. They don't degrade, they require

(06:47):
harmful processes to manufacture, and in some cases they can
burden the world and our bodies with toxic compounds and microplastics.
For that reason, scientists have long dreamed of producing comparable
materials out of organic proteins. Spider silk has always beckoned
as nature's finest model, but given their ornerary individualistic natures,

(07:09):
spiders were always likely to be cut out of the mix.
Efforts to create spider proteins without the spider began in
Earnest in the nineteen nineties. According to molecular biologist Randy Lewis,
then at the University of Wyoming. At first, he and
his team eyed E. Coli as a potential host. Their

(07:30):
thought process, if you could engineer the bacteria to produce
spidrains as part of their regular metabolism, you could cultivate
them in a fermentation tank as if you were brewing beer,
then separate the spidrains from the mix, spin them into
fibers and bloi la spider silk. That failed. Bacteria are

(07:50):
so tiny that they struggled to produce comparatively comparatively huge proteins,
and even when they do, they can't mimic Spider's intricate
physical weaving process. Lewis turned to goats as possible spid
drawing producers via their milk, and then alfalfa and silkworms.
Nothing worked. The gene editing tools of the time were cumbersome,

(08:12):
and neither Lewis nor the other researchers pursuing genetically modified
organisms spider silk could engineer a host to make enough protein.
Then technology came to the rescue. Crisper CAST nine arrived
in the early twenty tens with the ability to rewrite
genes at will in living organisms. Finding hosts for spider

(08:32):
silk became easier. The new technology significantly improved the expression
level of spider silk protein. According to shengyang Gong, a
transgenic silkworm expert at Suchow University near Shanghai. In twenty
twenty three, Chinese researchers were able to coax full length

(08:52):
spider silk from a transgenic silkworm for the first time.
The material had six times the toughness, the measure of
a matchere ceial's capacity to deform without breaking of kevlar.
For Craig biocraft laboratories, the new advances in genetic editing
unlocked the ability to engineer worms with just enough spidroins

(09:13):
to make a spider silk analog without hampering the worm's productivity.
According to Craig founder and CEO Kim Thompson, the company's
latest silk is a big step forward. This material is
not going to stop a seven forty seven, he says,
but it's better than regular silk. It's stronger and more flexible.
It's not quite spider sialt but it is super silk,

(09:35):
and most important, it's scalable. Some eight thousand miles away
from Craig's Michigan Lab in the steamy silk belt of Vietnam,
where there are plenty of mulberry leaves for silkworms to
eat and plenty of skilled workers to rear them. Craig
has established commercial scale farms where these little beasties are
weaving super silk daily. Many of the company's worms, including

(09:58):
all those in Vietnam, fluoresce green under ultraviolet light and
a filter thanks to the insertion of a jellyfish chin,
a way of identifying the modified worms. It took years
to figure out how to keep the lap grown silkworms
from dyeing under commercial scale conditions, die offs that nearly
ruin the company, But the links have been worked out,

(10:20):
says Thompson. In significant quantities of sample fabric will be
shipped to major clothing brands for testing in twenty twenty six.
After all these years, he says, we are finally going
to make the shipment. For now. Craig is hoping luxury
fashion houses show interest in it stronger than silk supersilk,
because the clothing industry is the most straightforward, if obvious,

(10:42):
path to driving commercial revenue. For the first time in
the company's twenty years in the meantime, it continues trying
to engineer silkworms that can spin pure spider silk at scale,
all while Craig's Super Silk Making competition across the globe
explores other applications for the material, some simple, some radical.

(11:03):
Spider silk as a supermaterial harnessed by humans has been
dogged by both optimistic hype and some material mistakes. Plenty
of promising projects have burned up on the lodge pad
as companies hunt for a real world application. In twenty fifteen,
Japanese start up Spiber, which uses tanks of genetically engineered

(11:24):
microbes to bruise silk proteins, designed a parka in partnership
with the North Face, only to see it suffer from
extreme shrinkage. Spider Silk's tendency to contract as much as
fifty percent when wet is an excellent quality for keeping
a web taught under the weight of dew, but not
for a winter jacket. A later iteration of Spiber's silk

(11:47):
solved the problem, but never made it to mass production.
Craig Biocraft's twenty sixteen contract with the US Army to
test its material in bulletproof vests didn't pan out. Airbus
teamed up with Jerminise AM Silk, which also brews protein,
to experiment with supersilk based composite materials for the aerospace industry,

(12:09):
but nothing progressed. Supersilk as a world changing textile has
not had much success as a year of As years
of R and D have turned into decades, companies like Spiber,
Craig and AM Silk have yet have had to find
applications that might provide a revenue stream now. And it
turns out the most right now value of spider silk

(12:31):
derived materials might have nothing to do with how we
think about fibers. AM Silk has pivoted toward two applications
with a low barrier to entry, dishwashing and laundry deterchins.
Although companies micro produced proteins do not yet make superior fabric,
they can still link together to form a microscopic and

(12:52):
non toxic biofilm that repels water keeping dishes and clothes.
Spotless dishwashing soap is full of chemicals right now, says
Gudrun Vogtentons, AM Silk's chief scientific officer. If you take
up the chemicals and add our spider silk protein instead,
you get the same performance, but from a sustainability or

(13:13):
an environmental point of view, it's way better. A planet
friendly tide pod is not going to save the world,
but it's doable today and advise an R and D
department time to keep working on moonshots, which all the
companies involved believe are right around the corner. But those
moonshots may be less about the spider silk itself and

(13:34):
more about the process of learning to design proteins. With
the advancement of synthetic biology and protein engineering technologies, it
is entirely possible to design artificial proteins that outperform natural
spider silk, says Gong. That's Speiber's proach over the past decade.
It's built a library of proprietary protein designs with amino

(13:57):
acid sequences that have no analog in nature and allow
for products specific flexibility. Some designs in this library resemble
spider silk more closely, while others are closer to silkworm silk,
says executive vice president Kenji Higashi. Tomorrow it might be
a better dish detergent, but the new hope for spider

(14:19):
silk lies in revolutionizing human health. One of the quirks
of materials science is that the inventions often precede the applications. Teflon, aerogel,
and graphene were all stumbled upon by researchers seeing what
they could make, and then it was up to the
world to figure out what to do with it. That
may well be the case with super silk too. We

(14:42):
thought we were chasing better bullet proof vests, but the
real value lies inside our own bodies. In the case
of spider silk, the quest to unlock the secrets of
its strength and flexibility has led to a new understanding
of protein structures and how those translate into performance. At
the microscopic scale. Beyond fabric recombinant, spider silk proteins can

(15:05):
be processed into diverse forms films, hydrogels, sponges, microcapsules, and nanoparticles,
says Shimai Ki, who researches spider silk based therapeutics at
Suchow University. What once seemed nearly impossible is now becoming

(15:25):
technically and economically feasible. The applications being explored would be revolutionary.
Spider's silk influenced gels and biofilms can coat catheters and
surgery meshes, reducing infections in blood clots. They can line
wound dressings and improved cosmetics. At the nanoscale level, they
become legos, giving gene jockeys the ability to design new

(15:48):
molecules one amino acid at a time, forming shapes and
functions that go beyond anything available in nation nature's pharmacy
that could revolutionize tissue engineering and drug delivery. The strength
and biodegradability of spidroins make them excellent designers scaffolding upon
which new ligaments, cartilage, and nerves can grow, and these

(16:11):
genetically crafted proteins are extremely well tolerated by the body.
Spidrowing nanoparticles already meet most of the critical biomedical requirements,
says she. They are biodegradable, bio compatible, safe, and can
be produced under mild scalable conditions for drug delivery. She
is currently working on a new generation of vaccines in

(16:34):
which spidrilling nanocapsules could carry the delicate immune system stimulating
molecules to their targets and release them at slow, sustained rates. Ultimately,
we hope that these silk inspired materials will bridge biology
and medicine, said she. Turning one of nature's most remarkable

(16:54):
structural proteins into a platform for human health. That transformation
will not come tomorrow. Navigating the miles of regulations and
clinical trials required for the approval of anything in the
medical industry takes years. But yet again, super Silk's hype
has found a second wind, and the payoff could be
worth the weight. Until then, the hard working silkworms in

(17:16):
Michigan and China and Vietnam will keep munching and weaving,
blissfully unaware that they're pushing science forward with every fiber
they spin. How a spider spins its silk, spider's silk
owes its special powers to both a unique molecular structure
and and arachnid's intricate spinning prosss. Scientists have spent decades

(17:38):
trying to replicate the spiders, all natural but not so
easy to make super material A spider's strongest silk. Spiders
make seven types of silk, each with varying degrees of
stretch and strength and produced by different glands. Dragline silk
is the strongest, used for web scaffolding and catching prey.

(17:59):
In sce Czia, spider's silk factory. Spider silk production begins
with a solution of proteins called spidroins that are acidified
and dehydrated, then elongated on demand. Spiders use their legs
or gravity to pull the thread from their spinnerets. The
secret of spider silk proteins Extraordinarily long spidroins contain two

(18:22):
amino acid groups, one coiled for stretchability and another compact
for strength. Bundled in a complex matrix of fibrils. The
proteins imbue spider silk with its signature traits, making spider
silk minus the spider. The production of spider silk at
scale hinges on genetic engineering. Scientists have coaxed a variety

(18:43):
of hosts into making a recumbent version that could unlock
breakthroughs in everything from clothing to medicine applications. Textiles from
shirts and parkas to bulletproof fabrics to car interior's recumbent
silk fiber has been eyed by multiple industries as a
fully recyclable and microplastic free textile option. Cosmetics, silk proteins

(19:08):
can be added to hair and skin care products to
help form a protective surface level shield. In early tests
of facial products, users have reported smoother skin detergents as
a non toxic ingredient indition laundry detergent. Silk proteins repel
water naturally and create ultra thin, invisible coatings on dishes

(19:29):
and glasses to prevent residue build up medicine. When used
in sutures, silk proteins, which are biocompatible with our immune system,
promote cell tissue regeneration. They also can be used to
carry drugs to targeted areas in the body. Next an
ancient vessel. From an ancient vessel, thousands of pieces of

(19:51):
pottery crafted in Campagna in what's now Southernatalie filled the
hold of erect Greek ship. The cargo went down in
the world western Mediterranean, only to rise again a couple
of millennia later. Thanks to Jacques eve Cousteau, famed oceanographer
and National Geographic Explorer. In nineteen fifty two, off a
French islet near Marseilles. Marseilles, his divers launched one of

(20:16):
the world's first underwater excavations, and the breath of the
hall was extraordinary. Alongside more than seven thousand ceramic pieces
were some two thousand clay jugs called Ampheri once full
of wine. They'd belonged Archaeologists later realized to two different
ships wrecked at the same site. When Cousteau found a
single jug still sealed, he had the cork scraped away

(20:39):
and poured out what a crewmate called a dark brown, thick,
lumpy syrup. Upon swigging the dregs of the ancient wine,
Cousteau wrote, I tasted all the mustiness and age there
is in this world. This article by Brian Kevin next.
Can tik Tok resurrect Scots by Raw Perlin Inside the

(21:01):
decidedly modern campaign to revitalize a lost language that some
say isn't truly a language. When herkl Derkel went viral
on social media a couple of years ago, most of
the people using the phrase had only a fate ideal
of what language it came from, but not Len Penny.
Penny as a poet and Scott's language influencer with more

(21:23):
than a million followers on Instagram, TikTok and other platforms
Originally from just outside Glasgow, the twenty six year old
appreciates that people connected with herkl Derkel as a fun
funny sounding way to say lounge in bed when one
should be up and about, just like how the cozy,
convivial concept of piggey from Danish and Norwegian entered the

(21:47):
zeitgeist years before. But old fashioned herkl derkel is not
a word that most people in Scotland are going to know,
says Penny, partly because it's the linguistic equivalent of a
penny farthing and early type of bicycle, and partly because
Scotts has been hiding in plain sight even in its
homeland for decades. Lately, however, with the help of young

(22:08):
ambassadors and activists like Penny, Scots is making itself known
not just on TikTok but in everyday life. Today, Scott's
is spoken by roughly one point five million people, with
almost another million having some understanding of the language, which
in a country of about five point five million is
no small amount. Last year it was granted official status

(22:30):
by the government, alongside Gaelic, which is spoken by some
one hundred thirty thousand people. But Scott's still lives in
the shadow of English, the dominant language in Scotland, historically
spoken mostly south and east of the Highlands. Scotts was
the nation's quasi official tongue, complete with a growing literature,

(22:53):
until the union with England in seventeen oh seven put
English decisively on top. After that it was considered the
language of the uneducated. No matter how beloved Robert Burns Light,
Scott's verse was within living memory. You could get corporal
punishment for speaking it at school. Even now, Scott's still

(23:13):
carries a kind of hillbilly stigma, pushing back on their
attitude while battling for the hearts and minds, or perhaps
the tongues and ears of non Scott's speakers. Is a
younger generation of creatives, singers, writers, social media natives and
others reviving and reinventing the language for the twenty first
century in their twenties and thirties, hailing from all over

(23:36):
the country. They're bringing Scott's into tiktoks and text messages,
pop music covers and poetry. This has just all come
out of nowhere, says Penny of her own trajectory as
she steps out of the BBC Scotland Studios in Glasgow,
where she hosts a four times weekly Scott's inflected radio

(23:56):
show on arts and culture. It's not lost on her
that she broadcasts from inside what was once a famous
bastion of proper English. During the COVID pandemic, Penny's therapist
advised her to get a hobby. Cross stitching hurt her
hands too much, so she started writing poetry and sharing
it online. One poem, in particular, heart love Letter to

(24:18):
her mother and grandmother, part language lesson, went viral within
its lines, and a telesized phrase in English is challenged
by its equivalent in Scott's I'm no having children, I'm
gonna have wains and ye can ask with a cry
them know what are the names. Penny went on to

(24:38):
publish an award winning poetry collection in twenty twenty four,
with a follow up volume this past fall, both in
a mix of the two languages. Meanwhile, her social media fans,
seventy percent of them in the United States hang on
her Scott's word of the day. Recent examples include smook
it or a sly crafty person as in an offy

(25:01):
smoked wee smote and awfully sly yet insignificant person. And
prinkle meaning glitter, as in his e'en eye prinkle, His
eyes always glitter, squint and you can see that plenty
of Scott's words are close cognates with English ones. But
where Scot's has long been considered a dialect, plenty of

(25:22):
linguists insists it's really more a sister language of English,
with its own distinct vocabulary, grammar and resonance. That's complicated
by the fact that it's not uncommon for speakers to
move between English and Scots. There are different spellings, pronunciations
and usages. The Doric Scot's dialect of the Northeast and

(25:43):
Aberdeenshire is different to the Scots of Rsher and Galloway,
and different again to Glaswegian Scots, says Emma Harper, a
Scottish parliament member who championed Scott's officialization. Penny another active
as off and reflect this interwoven reality, while also challenging

(26:03):
listeners to figure certain things out for themselves. Everybody's got
their own standard, Penny says. While many Scott's speakers celebrate
all this variety, others hope that official recognition will provide
a degree of clarity, consistency, and active protection, the kind
that will guard against, say a North Carolina teenager who

(26:24):
barely knew the language writing half of the entire Scott's
language Wikipedia entry in a garbled pseudo Scots for the
better part of a decade, as was discovered in twenty twenty.
On the other side, some worry that viralities like Herkl
dirkl just continue a history of not taking the language seriously,

(26:46):
a process of cutesy commodification that Penny links to the
tartan t towel and kilt faux identity that's packaged for Taurus.
Parliamentarian Harper gives plenty of credit to the new cohort
of influencers for helping keep the language well youthful. Young people,
like most Scot's code switch on a daily basis, and

(27:08):
his social media has integrated itself into their daily lives,
so the code they use online is their day to
day one, which in most cases is Scot's, says Harper.
It's a good example of government matching its actions in
legislation with the reality of what's happening in society right now.
Thousands of young people using Scots on a daily basis

(27:29):
an ancient language in a very modern context, further proof, writers, musicians,
and artists are taking Scots in new directions. While reading
at the recent launch of his debut poetry collection, Gooni.
Laswegian poet Michael Mullan thirty, wearing a fabulously decorative suit,
mixed languages as fluently as a mixed talk of vodka

(27:52):
and Iernbrue, Scotland's national soft drink and queer New York
icon Marsha P. Johnson. This conclud's readings from National Geographic
Magazine for Today. Your reader has been Marsha. Thank you
for listening, Keep on listening and have a great day.