July 29, 2016 at 01:48AM

Today I Learned: 1) Spider silk products might just happen after all. For those not in the know, spider silk is a bit of a nanotechnologist's dream. It's smooth and silky like, well, like silk, but it's also super elastic and has a ridiculously high tensile strength, much higher than steel and appreciatly higher than kevlar. Moreover, different kinds of spider silk, made by mixing different protein subunits in different ratios and with different spinning techinques, can have different properties. Personally, I count spider silk as my version of flying cars -- when we have commercially-available spider silk, we will officially be living in the future. Again. Why don't we just farm spiders? Well, the trouble is that spiders are really hard to cultivte. Notoriously hard. The main problem is that just about all spider species are cannibalistic, so they can't be grown in very high density. That hasn't stopped some people from harvesting spider silk for select applications, but it's damned expensive (~$100,000/kg, according to Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, which I'll get to in a second). Scientists have been trying to reproduce spider silk for a long time, and more recently, they've been trying to produce it sans spider. Enter Kraig Biocraft Laboratories and Bolt Threads, two relatively new companies looking to put spider silk on the open market. I'll start with Kraig Biocraft Labs. Their approach is straight-up biotech -- they're experts with silk protein genes, and their goal is to bioengineer silkworms to produce spider silk instead of silkworm silk. If that works, then KBL can just slot the spidersilkworms into a standard silk-harvesting operation and they'll have bolts and bolts of spider silk. While that's really cool, the one *I'm* actually rooting for is Bolt Threads, a *very* recent startup that's taking a more mixed approach. A lot of their techniques are hush-hush right now, but what from what I gather, they're producing silk proteins en-masse in bioengineered yeast, extracting the individual proteins (not easy! Spider silk likes to crash out of solution and form thread, so storing it in liquid form isn't trivial), and physically weaving them into thread using robots (microfluidics?) inspired by spider spinnerettes. This requires a *lot* more new technology than KBL's plan, but has the advantage that Bolt Threads can quickly pivot into different silk versions, with extreme flexibility in the properties of the silk they produce. At this stage, Bolt Threads is also marketing very heavily on the idea that their thread is much cleaner to produce -- since it's produced straight from purified protein to thread, it shouldn't require the harsh, environmentally damaging chemical treatments that traditional textile industries use to get the kind of quality we expect from textiles these days. 2) It is possible to sing underwater. There's a group called AquaSonic that has perfected the art of underwater music, including underwater singing. Their music includes, among other things, vocals, gongs, hurdy-gurdies, violins, chimes, and aquarium walls. Check them out: http://ift.tt/2a8MvHN Thanks to Sarah Seid for bringing this to my attention! 3) There is at least one species of orchid whose roots smell truly vile. At first I thought it must be some sort of means of attracting pollinators, but if that's the case... why the roots?