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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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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,

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 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, 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,

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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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.