Spider Tech

no spider spiders on your body. You couldn't find any 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 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 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, 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 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.

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, 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 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 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

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, 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

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 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 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, 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 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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

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. 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 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, 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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. 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, brought to you by Toyota. Let's Go Places,