Cities of Wood and Bone

now we're making good on that threat. Yes. In April sixteen, we published an episode called Building Materials of the Future colin Bio Edition, um and uh yeah, so that we would return to the topic of construction materials science at some point, because in that episode we went, okay, we we a went really deep into the problems with concrete and cement, which are largely environmental um and and we also went into a couple of potential alternatives to concrete,

including a materials built by bacteria or fungus, or materials made in part with hemp or wool or seaweed or animal blood. Oh yeah, the blood bricks, those are good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm just thinking about bricks made of wool and Minecraft right now, it's just it's always but then I have to be fair. Minecraft is always close at the top of my mind. Do they have bricks made of blood? No, but you can't make brakes made out of wool. Did

we have the same conversation last time. I think we did, and I talked about how in a thunderstorm, if lightning strikes your wool structure, it will catch on fire and burned out. But at any rate, one of the things that drove that discussion was that if you look into how much it costs US an energy and and in carbon emissions to make concrete and cement, it is not

a trivial amount. According to the U s Energy Information Administration, if you choose to believe them, the cement industry accounted for a quarter of one percent of national energy consumption in the United States. And and that that sounds like it's small. You're talking about one quarter of one percent, but that's total energy consumption, which is a huge number.

So it's a slightly less huge number. Yeah, And to put it into another perspective that that accounts for like ten times it's fair share of energy consumption compared to its its output in terms of gross national goods and services in the United States. Right, So it's economic value, right, It's economic value is much lower than the energy value

we're pouring into it compared to other industries. And by that very nature, that's what got us talking about, well, why are we still using it and are we looking into anything else? Well, the reason we're still using it is that it's it's the it's very useful. It's it's useful, and there's an established industry, there's an established infrastructure for it. So you know, there are reasons why we're using it.

But there are a lot of reasons that people are looking into alternatives because of this energy requirement, the fact that the carbon emissions are pretty high, and that transporting this stuff is not cheap either. And so so there are lots of other materials that we didn't get around to covering in the last episode, and let's get into a few of them today. How about would would Well, wait, we already use wood to build things, but this is a little bit different, isn't it. We're gonna use more

wood better, future, would better? Better? Better? With more wood? Now, please timber things. It sounds like I've just had a complete brain event, but No, seriously, one of the building materials of the future may very well just be be would But well, I say, just, but that's not really true.

It's gonna be a new type of wood that goes through a specific manufacturing process so that it increases its strength and its resistance to stuff like fire, which is important and allows it to hold a much heavier load than say your traditional wooden house. Right, So the way we use wooden construction today is for small scale construction a couple of stories. Maybe there's no reason not to

build a wooden house. But once you're talking about high density occupancy, that's where our big large scale industrial building materials like steel, concrete, cement, Uh, they sort of take over. Like when you're we're building tall buildings in an urban environment, and tall buildings and urban environments is kind of where we're going with buildings. As we have talked on this podcast about the floor. Yeah, there's a worldwide urbanization trend.

People are moving into the city's and packing them in right, and being able to build up helps take care of this density problem as opposed to sprawling further and further out from a city center, which can come with a lot of different problems that we in Atlanta are very wilier. With all that good infrastructure stuff transport and water and et cetera, you'll see a lot of other things, uh, increase in cost because of that. So being able to build upward has a lot of different benefits. So we're

actually seeing a project. It's a it's a cooperation between Cambridge University's Department about Architecture and p LP ARCHICHEC Tecture and engineers Smith and Walwork and they're working on an eighty story building that would be three or four feet tall made out of timber. Essentially. That sounds pretty crazy, it's it's The project is being called the Oakwood Tower. Um it would be if it was If it goes on to be to be built, it will be the

second tallest building in London after only the Shard. You know, I used to live in Oakwood, but that was Oakwood, Georgia. So you might wonder like, well, why are we even looking at Wood again, What's what's the big deal? Why why appear to take a step backward in human architecture. But actually, as it turns out, Wood has got a lot of things going for it. For one thing, it's a renewable resource. That's a big one, right, as long as you harvest it responsibly. Yeah, and plant more trees

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

produces less of a strain on the area around it. Uh, it would cost less, it would take less time to build these these structures actually go up pretty fast, um, and it could be uh more resistant to fire actually, which is a little weird to think of when you're talking about we're lying so alright, So the way I've seen it described is that the way this wood is made, you get a char that's on the outside of the wood. But it is very difficult for fire to penetrate further

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

so you're you're talking about wood composed in layers. And also yeah, like like the natural tendency of a char on the outside of wood acts as a protective layer against the stuff further inside. Right, So in these circumstances, with a large enough item of wood, yeah, you could also have treated wood as well, which would make it even more fire resistant. And this is all very important because so so a lot of this work is being done. Like we said, in London, let me tell you a

little bit about London wooden buildings and fire. There was a little event in sixteen sixty six, the Great Fire of London. London was devastated by this fire. More than thirteen thousand houses were destroyed, uh somewhere almost like seven different major churches and landmarks were destroyed. I think I remember reading Samuel Peep's diary entry about this. Did he have one? It was it about a different fire? Maybe I'd have to, I would have to do more research

to tell you that. The fact on that I can tell you that there were only six recorded deaths. Now, there were probably a lot more that didn't go recorded, but there are only six recorded deaths that were connected to the sixteen sixty six Great Fire of London. There were a lot of reasons why this fire was able to rage out of control and caused so much devastation. A big one was that London at that time had

no official organized fire brigade. It's a huge drawback. Um. But another big one was that a lot of the buildings were made out of wood and they were very close together. If you've ever been through any of the historic areas of England and you see like the like, you'll see these super narrow alleyways where buildings will actually touch above the alley, they'll be in contact with each other. And that's how London at the time looked, and so fire could spread very easily from from house to house

because they were pretty much in contact with one another. UM. So things are different now, obviously, and the actual timber we're using is different now. Very important when you're talking about a city that one of its defining historical moments was a massive fire, and certainly other cities as well have sure, yeah, Chicago has had a massive one as well. Planta is a little bit upset about it still, Yeah, Atlanta,

who was a purposefully set fire. But yes, yeah. Another possible benefit to using wood as opposed to other materials is really aesthetic. According to the project leaders, the Brits might be more receptive to taller buildings if they're made out of natural materials rather than concrete. Here's where we get a little touchy feely, because they say, like, hey, you know how sometimes you go outside and it just feels nice. I wouldn't be great if it felt nice

when you win inside. What if we talk the stuff that's outside and put it inside, then inside would be nice like the outside. I'm being a little facetious, but that's kind of how it comes across. And there is science behind this, like feeling of nice science it. Yeah,

So there have been studies, I'll say that now. According to a piece on the University of Cambridge website, recent studies have shown that timber buildings can have a positive health effect, and from an armchair psychology perspective, it certainly seems intuitive right, the idea that you could have this a natural setting or a more natural setting may feel

more relaxing than a very sterile, you know, artificial synthetic setting. UM, but it's it's hard to say, like is that true or is that just uh an intuition that may or may not have any founding in science. Well, one of those studies was conducted by the University of British Columbia

and FP Innovations. But to be fair, FP Innovations is a nonprofit Canadian organization that's closely tied to the forest industry, So you gotta keep that in mind, like who is the person, Like what are the entities that are sponsoring and conducting the study and do they have a vested

interest in the outcome? But the study claims that would surfaces lower the sympathetic nervous system activation UH, the S and S in other words, so that means that areas with wind services tend to be more relaxing and can help with stress management, which in turn can have a

positive impact on health in general. We've done episodes about the future of stress, and it is clear stress UH, certain types of stress affected by the environment, and and they can have a very powerful effect on your health and well being. So that's that's not in question. So in the study, what they ended up doing was they held an experiment. They had four different office environments with varying levels of artificial versus natural kind of surfaces, like

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

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

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

I don't know that. I don't think it was double blind. I'm pretty sure that people administering the test knew what was going on. Uh So they had like skin contact sensors put on to kind of uh detect when there were spikes in stress. You know, the idea being that if you detect sweat, someone's obviously feeling a little more stress than someone who isn't sweating that kind of stuff. So they put these students in one of those four

office environments. Each student then had to go through three phases, again not being told what was happening or why it was happening. The first phase was they were left alone for ten minutes in the room, which actually had their their anxiety start to climb because they're sitting there wondering what's going to happen to them they don't know. Uh. Then the next phase was that they had to take an audio mathematic test, so they're listening to math problems

and having to work on them. This this was in order to again increase their level of anxiety. Let's see what happens when we take the puppy away. Um. And then at the end they were left alone again to kind of decompress, to to recover from the stressful experience they just had. And UH. All the data would be analyzed later. And according to the researchers, the S and S activation was lowest in office environ mints that had wood services and furnishings. Uh. And they were lowest during

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

It doesn't mean that the conclusions are wrong. It just means we have to keep that in mind when we hear this and not just say all right, well case closed,

it's definite. Now, well, you know, one thing I would think is, uh, I was just running through this in my mind, wondering how I would feel in different different material environments as far as stress goes trying to do math problems, and I would think, you know, I wonder if environments that are most like the environments where I went to school would be the most stressful, uh so like, and that would not be wooden environments, so that could

be another you know, like associations. I mean there there's definitely, again the gut feeling type of stuff. There's definitely some stuff that makes me feel that they're onto something here.

Even if I don't go so far as to say this definitively proves to me that that their hypothesis holds water, because I think of experiences if I had going to like a rustic cabin and breathing in the smell of like you can smell the wood and and it has that very warm tone to it, like there is something very kind of termites, There is something kind of cozy

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

I like wooden environment. What's what's aesthetic? And uh and and there are certainly lots of kind of bunk psychology experiments into into the esthetics of an environment, in the in the color tones of an environment that are going to inform uh, you know, your opinion one way or another, at least your opinion of the scientists. That's fair. I often think of like my like, I like I like the whole cabin get away kind of thing, Like I

I enjoy that experience, and I enjoy that environment. My wife has a preference for very modern kind of architecture and furnishings, which don't necessarily fall into that same category. But that's what she finds really relaxing. So it doesn't necessarily mean that you know, the science is wrong or whatever. It just may be more complicated than this hypothesis or it maybe that's totally correct. It's just a study with a hundred nineteen people. It's hard to say at any rate.

I want to talk a little bit about what makes this particular type of wood so strong. We we mentioned that it's lots of different layers. Um. We're specifically talking about a type of wood product, industrial wood product called cross laminated timber or c LT. And you're starting to see this being used in the UK and Canada fairly extensively.

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

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

and such a high heat use it. Yeah, my my guess is that the kilns that used to dry boards are operating at significantly lower temperatures and for less time than for cement. But then you take the boards and uh so you put them so that the grain alternates by ninety degrees level by level. So some boards are gonna, like all the boards are gonna be the same dimension, but in some you're gonna have the grain going along the long side and some some you're gonna have the

grain going along the narrow side. So you stacks stack them with the grain alternating ninety degrees um. You make an odd numbered stack of boards, usually between three and seven. You glue them together using a special type of adhesive, and then you put it through a pneumatic press to press the board together and this creates a much stronger material that is still relatively light compared to alternatives, but

compared to regular wood, it's more dense. And yes, yes, and so uh and like I said, this stuff can go up pretty fast. Actually watched a video where a guy was talking about the process of building with the stuff. I was trying to I was thinking he was going to talk about the process of making it. No, he

was talking about using it to actually build. And what was fascinating to me was he said, so these panels, and the panels were huge, they were like maybe like you know, there were several feet wide and many more feet long. So we can put one of these up every seven to eight minutes. So building a structure out of that material goes pretty quickly compared to other types of materials. So that's one of those huge advantages. Yeah, and c LT isn't the only type of wood product

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

You know, if nature makes people feel better, maybe you need some fungus in your building. I mean packs packs of wolves are in nature to bring them on. Are you sure, I kind of I mean puppy dogs. Um, yes, yes, so so some some theorists are even imagining that that that GMO trees could be genetically constructed to provide ultimate building materials in the future. This has never entered my mind,

so I've thought tons about GMO crops. How do you know how to alter the genes of of food crops to make them, you know, have higher yields or more resistant to herbicides or something like that. But yeah, you could totally alter the genes of trees to produce a different kind of timber if you want to. Yeah, something with with more stronger, better cellulose, which is really the structure that we're talking about in terms of the benefits

of wood. I'm just thinking of genetically modifying mushrooms so that smurfs could live in them also lovely. So here's the question. We we've talked about the possibility of going back to using wood as a major component in building, including skyscrapers, which if you had told me about a few years ago, I thought would have thought it was crazy. Um, it doesn't make sense. Is it actually more sustainable and more environmentally friendly than the traditional concrete and steel stuff

that skyscrapers are made out of today? Well, okay. Proponents say that if if wooden construction like this takes off, or rather takes off again, UM, trees could be specifically farmed for for this type of use over long periods, so so you know, you wouldn't be destroying the rainforest

every time you wanted to erect a new apartment building. UM. And furthermore, since we're using less and less paper, UM, old paper timber farms could be applied to the trade in the meanwhile, while while we're getting our tree farms

up to up to standard. UM. Furthermore, people say that, you know, trees are used to store carbon dioxide while they're alive, and they retain it when they're dead, So so you're helping keep some carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, you've you've you've locked that carbon dioxide away, and you're growing more trees to replace the ones you've used, so

you're technically removing CEO two from the atmosphere in that approach. Also, in terms of g usage, WOULD is a better insulator than concrete or glass, or steel or aluminum, and I mean meaning that it has a relatively low thermal conductivity, so that could mean savings in terms of heating and cooling and you're finished buildings. Um. Also, since would, as you said earlier, Jonathan, is so much lighter than concrete, we would use wayless energy shipping it and putting up

structures that that contain it. So we're talking about a smaller energy investment in WOULD than it would take for concrete or steel, both in the construction and in the transportation of construction materials. All right, sure, um, And as a bonus to communities here, c LT buildings are are typically pre fabricated structures, even if they are being individually designed. A lot of the construction occurs off site, so when they go up, they go up quieter and quicker than

concrete based structures. So that's nice. I'm speaking as a human person who has apartments going up on either side of her house right now, Yeah, I would. I would love it if that would is less noisy every day at seven thirty in the morning. Right. So, let's let's look at some of the wooden structures that currently exists that are kind of like the models that we're working off of to think of these potential future projects, like

skyscrapers made out of timber. Yeah, I was, I was looking into this and it's and it's pretty fascinating if you're an architecture nerd hopefully even if you're not so okay, So, buildings that have like a concrete base sometimes called a podium in the industry, which is like the first floor usually uh and then a few upper stories consisting of lightwood framing have been around for decades. This isn't a

particularly new concept. But but taller buildings and some some made entirely of wood framing, but most honestly incorporating some steel or concrete elements have been have been sprouting up over the past like five or six years, um and and um Like. The more that I read into this, the more puns I came across, and I have not included all of them in this industry, also growding up. I also came across one where it decided to use all the fire puns. I thought, well, that's kind of tasteless. Yeah,

it's really catching fire, like, um can we can? We not? Anyway, So most of these structures so far are apartment buildings. In Australia and in Europe, there's there's an eight story high rise in Finland, ten story Forte in Melbourne, and the Cube in London and the fourteen story Treat which means tree in in in Norway. UM. In North America, timber buildings are more rare, but there are a few projects that are in development. There's already a really lovely

c LT structure in Canada. It's the University of British Columbia's Earth Sciences Building UM. But but Seattle has planned a twelve story mixed use project called Framework that's supposedly coming over the next couple of years thanks to a one point five million dollar grant from the US to Partment of Agriculture, which it won in a contest for tall wood building designs, and if it goes up, indeed,

it will be America's first tall wood building that's cool. Yeah, I gotta say really quickly though, that University of British Columbia Earth Sciences building that was one of the buildings that was actually shown in the video I was watching about the construction process, and the guy was actually talking about the free standing staircase that is inside that building, which is gorgeous. Yeah. You look at you and he says, like,

this thing. This shows how strong this this material is because it's it's anchored to the walls of the building, but it itself is a very tall there are no beams under it, right, It's very impressive to look at the gorgeous design of this building. And I'm really impressed with some of the approaches that I've seen architects take using this material in mind, you know, thinking like, well, it's gonna be made out of this stuff, so let me take a slightly different approach than I would with

a traditional building. Yeah. Yeah, and a lot of them, a lot of them are so gorgeous. So like, so, y'all, do do yourselves a favor. If you want to look at something pretty, go go google like CLT tall wood building or something like that, and and come up with all of these things but but but b Yeah, it's it's fascinating to me that a lot of the designs skew decidedly modern um, which is sort of like the opposite of what you'd expect from like a rustic wooden thing.

But but but but turns out being so beautiful. Yeah, it turned well. For one thing, the boards that they're producing, they're not going to be evocative of like the rough hewn log cabin. That's not what we're talking about here. It's a very different world when you're talking about this industrial wood that's been through and and and an industrial process. They've been through a pneumatic press for goingness sakes, Um, it's it's not akin to that rustic approach. Uh, And

yet you get that effect of a warm invironing environment. Yeah, especially has those I love those tones, like the color that you get with depending upon the types of wood you're using, that you get using this particular type of material.

So so, there are a few other projects that are in the works that I wanted to mention, the aptly named Tall Wood Building at the University of British Columbia, which is set to be eighteen stories high and to provide student housing there's a nineteen story cultural center slash hotel going up in Sweden and a twenty story mixed use building going up in Vienna. So things are moving

and shaken in the wood building industry. And and honestly, it's at this point not as much physics as much as regulation that is keeping this from being more widespread than it currently is because because building codes, as as we have mentioned about the fire thing, are really a

huge hurdle to to wood framed wood framed structures. Um. But but but advances in the industry could and will hopefully lead to updates in both fire codes and building codes and getting some good, good pointy legal distinction among different types of wood materials and and different combinations of those materials with concrete and steel to allow us for increased opportunities to to incorporate wood into construction. Yeah, and I

like I like hearing that. I like the idea of being able to define these things so that we can remove the barriers there and and seemore develop in this. I love the notion of a timber um uh, you know, skyscraper. It's such it's such a counterintuitive idea to me. The only thing that I think would be stranger is if you built a structure out of bone. Yeah, how about we build some cities out of bones and shells? Yeah?

When when you Joe mentioned the idea of using bone or or a bone like material to build structures out of the first thing I thought of was city of Bones. Sounds like it could totally be a novel in the Song of Ice and Fire series. I knew there was already there had to be a novel called City of Bone, and I looked it up. Yeah, there is one urban fantasy novel. I'm not quite sure what that means. I think it's like with tall buildings. And I read some

Jim Butcher. Okay, Jim Butcher got that urban fantasy downpat definitely with wizards and cities. Yeah, okay, did they take the subway sometimes? Actually, magic doesn't interfere with electricity, right, yeah, Jim Butcher's wizards. Yeah, he makes he makes technology fail around them, computers, smartphones, like things that are that are necessary to the plot. His magic will interfere with those. Cool. Yeah, Okay, So how about building some tall buildings in cities out

of out of bone like structures? So here comes Cambridge. Again, there's a twenty June. Just recently, in fact reading this was what gave me the idea for this episode. There's a June Cambridge University research feature on the work of Dr Michelle Oyen of Cambridge's Engineering Department and OI in works with constructing biomemetic materials. We talked about biomemetics all the time on this podcast, trying to create technology that

mimics things we find in nature. So a lot of times that might be nanomachines or or you know, robotics, but in this case it's talking about bioinspired materials that take after the materials that are used to make up tissues in the bodies of animals. Um and so the type of materials she's been looking into in her research have been things like artificial eggshell and artificial bone. So no surprise that these could be very useful in creating

things like medical devices such as prosthetics and implants. But um what if these types of materials could also be the structural basis for our buildings. So here's why these are interesting. We already know what it's like to try to build a holding out of minerals. You know, you've got concrete, cement, you know, rock based materials that you can build a building out of. But the eggshell and bone are not just minerals. There. There are a mixture

of minerals and proteins. Bones are about half and half, with the mineral component being high hydroxy appetite or hydroxyl appetite. It's a calcium based mineral and the protein component mainly being collagen. Eggshells are a little bit different. They're much higher mineral content, only about five percent protein. But these combinations of minerals and proteins make ideal structural materials. There's a reason your body uses them. Uh they're they're very adaptable,

and they're very strong and very resilient. So the minerals give the material hardness, but the proteins give the material toughness. And these are actually different physical concepts. If you're not familiar, quick refresher. Hardness is how resistant a material is to permanent change in formation. So a material that's resistant to cutting, scratching, permanent bending, that's a hard material, a tough material. Toughness refers to how much energy material can absorb before it fractures.

So an easy way to remember this is that toughness is the opposite of brittleness. Something that's brittle and breaks easily is not tough. Uh. So many materials are one or the other, Like a big piece of rubber might be tough but not hard. A piece of glass, on the other hand, hard but not tough, right exactly. But biomaterials like bones are both hard and tough, which would come in awful handy if you wanted to build a structure out of such material. You want something that has

both of those qualities exactly. So how do you build a synthetic or artificial biomaterial based on the concept behind things like bone and eggshell? Well, essentially you come by in the mineral components you're using with with the sample of the protein collagen which you find all throughout animal bodies, and you know you can get for research purposes. And so a cool thing about these two different structures I've brought up bones and eggshells is that they have very

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

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

they have different qualities, they sort of reinforce each other. Yeah, so, so how how does this stuck up in terms of like greenness? Yeah, that that's the thing. So the problems with things like steel and concrete cement being the ingredient, and concrete, they take all this energy to produce and they're all these carbon emissions associated with the production. Apparently, this is much less energy intensive process for making these biommetic materials takes place in the lab at room temperature

rather than hours of intense firing. But we need the biomaterials in order to make it happen. So do do you have enough collagen lying around. To build a skyscraper need slaughter exactly right now, The obvious way to get collagen is from animals. You need it for material synthesis,

but from animal bodies we're back to blood bricks, right. Yeah, it's not ideal because I mean, for one thing, you would look at a building and then you would just naturally think how many how many pigs seals baby seals, uh,

floors three through seventeen. That is why to make this a feasible construction material, we probably need to find a way to substitute a protein element that doesn't come from animals, like a synthetic protein, or maybe something that could be derived from algae or bacteria or some other farmabile organism doesn't have a nervous system to make you feel bad about.

And on top of that, I mean, even you're talking about in the lab, it could be created under room temperature conditions, which is in fact that's that's a huge advantage on the energy side. The question also beyond where do you get the protein? Once you've answered that question satisfactorily, where you're presumably not slaughtering hundreds of animals or to get to the protein, you need The next question is can you scale that production to a point where it

would be useful for a real construction project. I don't know what the answer is. Oien claimed in this piece that that it is scalable, interested in can be scaled up in the lab. But but obviously you know, we don't. We never really tried it, so we don't know. So not only are we going to have to address the idea of changing the types of materials we're using to build, we also need to rethink the way we're actually building stuff today. I mean, it does seem like there's some progress.

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

doing things they we use concrete, we use steal. So a wooden structure or brick structure, steel and glass structure, concrete structure, and a bio mimetic bone temple all have differences at the blueprint stage that you have to study and take into account. Sure, yeah. I mean it's it may seem like we're we're saying the obvious, but this is something that you do have to take. You have

to keep in mind. It's not like it's not as easy as just saying, hey, this other material is better, let's go to that now and from now on everyone uses this. There's a lot of momentum and inertia that's built into the systems that we human beings have designed. Sometimes that's to our benefits. Sometimes it means that we feel like progress isn't happening because we're not changing as quickly as we would like. But it's just a it's

a matter of fact. It's not something that you can snap your fingers and and everything changes from this point forward. An assembly line is really great at creating your your your standard coffee mug. But if suddenly you want to make a coffee mug out of bone, right, it's yeah, or a little bit of grinding to a halt. Right, You're like, like, well, we've decided now that the coffee mugs are all going to be made out of bio

mimetic bone, and they're going to like skulls. It's going to require a little bit of retooling of our manufacturing process. Everyone who wants to drink out of a skull for the record, I would buy that. Like today, I have three coffee mugs that are sugar skull designed, so I also would have one of those. Uh So, out of curiosity, I looked up away in scientific papers just to see if there were any more specifics that that I could

find about the details of her recent research. And a lot of the research she's been involved in uh in one way or another seemed focused on studying micro environments or scaffolds that can facilitate natural artificial lost teo genesis. And of course osteogenesis is the process of growing new bone cells. It's the process you would want to mimic if you're going to try to grow some synthetic bone

in the lab. So there were several papers about using hydro gels to simulate the micro environment in which bone cells grow. One of the most cited was a paper from with Annabel L. Butcher and Giovannis off a do called nano fibrous hydrogel composite as mechanically robust tissue engineering scaffolds. What does all that mean? So when you're when you're doing tissue engineering in the lab, cells usually have to

be grown on what's called a scaffold. It's a it's some type of material, often a polymer, that gives a shape and an environment in which the in vitro tissues can assume their function. So it's sort of like you need to have a muffin tin to bake your muffins in. If you just tried to pour your muffin batter onto the oven rack, you would not produce ideal muffin. No, probably a fire, but no. We we've talked about this in the idea of three D printing organs for example.

That's that's scaffolding is absolutely necessary, not just for the cells to to have like something to glom onto, but in order for them to actually take on the function that you want them to do. Right and uh And in many cases, what you want is a scaffold that will that will hold a shape while the cells can grow around it to assume the morphology that you want, but also that will itself degrade or disappear in some way when the tissue needs to fill in that space.

So it needs to be there long enough to tell the cells where to go and guide them into place, but then go away when they need to fill in all the missing gaps. Uh So, hydrogels might be a good solution here. Hydrogels are gelatinous semi solids. They have some of the properties of a liquid and some of the properties of a solid, and that they have a constant volume and hold their shape like a like a

solid does. But they can also be disrupted by mechanical you know, activity like Jello is a good example of a hydrogel. When you when you read about a hydrogel, just think about something like the consistency of jello. And the paper concluded that hydrogels make great scaffolding for tissue engineering, but that they don't have great quote mechanical performance, which I'm just picturing. That's funny to them, I think, Jello,

what what is its mechanical performance? Like, yeah, but you can improve the mechanical What they concluded is you can improve the mechanical performance of hydrogels by lacing them with a fibrous component or nanofibers. Uh So, Anyway, I think that's that's sort of the stage that a lot of the research in h in the present is at. There they're looking at creating these environments, uh to grow these materials in interesting but back to back to buildings made

of bones. So if you imagine that we're we're getting some kind of biomamentic bone or eggshell or bone eggshell composite type material, and we're trying to figure out how to use this in in building. Some other advantages do naturally come to mind. One of them is that bone inspired buildings ultimately could provide not only environmentally sustainable materials that are both hard and tough, but think about other things bones do. One of them is that bones can heal.

Bones on Star Trek healed crew members. Yes, yeah, that's true. We should build buildings out of data. We have wharves. Oh that's true. We must stop. No, a broken bone where I think about a broken bone properly set right can commend itself. Now, it's not like that automatically a synthetic bone material would necessarily be able to do this, right. I mean, unless you built osteo blasts into it. It's you're right, you'd have to set out to give it this capability. Um, and it would depend on how it

was designed. But this is another goal you can strive for, and it seems quite achievable if your basis for your material is bone. So you imagine you could have like a bone damn. That's great, a bone. Damn fissures appear in the damn over time because of pressure, But then those tiny fractures could be healed up by a process akinned osteogenesis. You know. So this is like the song, you know, the song Damn bones, damn bones. I'm almost ashamed of myself. I want to thank the listener who

sent in the book about puns. It's true. I actually have it at my desk. That would be sparkling blue. Thank you, sparkling Blue. Uh no, this I was really fascinated by this topic. It was one of those things where as soon as you heard the idea of cities made of wooden bone, it kind of is evocative of like fantasy novels. Sure, and I mean I'm picturing that any building made made of artificial bone would have to be designed based on like hr Geigers. Right, yeah, anyway,

I've heard both. Uh yeah, I've said Geiger before, so we've got it covered. I'm someone saying, no, it's it's g j like, oh shoot, it's like that gift Jeff thing. Um. Then we're in trouble. But I love this idea and I love that, you know, this was something that I got to to learn about today, Like this was not something where I kind of knew about it moving into this episode. It was all discovery for me, and I love that. I hope that you listeners out there experience

something akin to that. And if you guys have suggestions for future episodes, maybe there's some other weird or awesome topic that is future oriented and you would like us to cover it, let us know. Send us an email. The address is FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or you can drop us a line on social media. We're on Twitter and Facebook. At Twitter we are FW thinking. You can search fw thinking on Facebook. We'll pop right up.

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