Climate change threatens supercomputing, and collecting spider silks

On this week’s show: Rising waters and intense storms make siting high-performance computer centers a challenge, and matching up spider silk DNA with spider silk properties

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First up on the podcast this week, News Intern Jacklin Kwan talks with host Sarah Crespi about how and where to build high-performance computing facilities as climate change brings extreme conditions to current locations.

Spiders are creeping into the show this week. Kazuharu Arakawa, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Bioscience at Keio University, discusses his Science Advances paper on collecting spider silks and the genes that make them. His team used the data set to connect genetic sequences to the properties of spider silks in order to harness this amazing material for industrial use.

Visit the spider silkomes database here: https://spider-silkome.org/ 

This week’s episode was produced with help from Podigy.

[Image: Dace Znotina/iStock; Music: Jeffrey Cook]

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Authors: Sarah Crespi; Jacklin Kwan

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