Typewriter

IMG_7334
Originally uploaded by thane.

World's first roller coaster, under construction

World's first roller coaster, under construction
Originally uploaded by thane.

Nudibranch ID card

link

Know one when you see one.

Got Silk?

Lawrence Osborne, New York Times
June 2002

link

Excerpts:

Nexia uses two common spider specimens, Araneus diadematus (the common garden spider) and Nephila clavipes (the golden orb weaver, native to many tropical forests). The spiders are frozen in liquid nitrogen, then ground into a brown powder. Since every cell of a spider contains the precious silk-producing genes, it’s easy to extract them. These genes are then tested in the "Charlotte machine," what Turner calls a "synthetic goat" that tests whether or not the gene will function inside an actual goat. Next, the gene is altered. A "genetic switch" is added, which programs the gene to "turn on" only inside the mammary gland of its new female host during lactation. The altered gene is then pushed on a fine glass pipette into a goat egg. The baby goat will have a spider gene present in each of its cells (its eyes, ears and hooves will all be part spider), but only in the mammary glands of female goats will the silk gene actually spring to life. The goat will eventually start lactating a kind of silk-milk mixture, which looks and tastes just like normal milk.

[...]

What's special about spider silk, as opposed to silk from worms, is that it is a unique liquid crystal. And that's what's magical, says Turner. "Liquid crystals are the Holy Grail of material sciences. They make for incredibly tough, light, strong materials with phenomenal properties. It's way beyond anything we humans can make. Milled steel pales next to it.

"But the complexity of arachnid silk is also what is problematic about it, from the point of view of biomimicry. Spider-silk proteins consist of very long strings of amino acids that are difficult to decode, and little is known of how spiders actually unravel them and spin them into threads. A spider, moreover, constructs its web methodically out of different kinds of silk. It builds diagonal support lines called "dragline silk" (which it also uses to hoist itself around its web) and then inner wheels called "the capture spiral" made from a more viscid, sticky silk. Dragline silk, says Turner, is the "best stopping material you've ever seen," but how it's actually made inside a small orb weaver's abdomen remains mysterious. And whereas spiders produce up to seven kinds of silk proteins, BioSteel, as yet, contains only one.

* * *

BioSteel (google search)

But now it's over three years since that NYT article, so how did BioSteel do in the meantime?

Nexia has decided to refocus fibre development towards biopolymer sales and specialized nano-scale fibre applications for spider silk and away from traditional fibres and yarns. This decision was prompted by the emerging interest in nanofibres and by the ongoing technical challenges of producing bulk, cost competitive spider silk fibres with superior mechanical properties, especially strength...

Posted by tplambeck at 12:13 AM

Music @ Menlo

Tonight, four Beethoven Op 18 string quartets performed by the excellent Miro quartet at the St. Marks Episcopal church in Palo Alto. The Music at Menlo festival is starting again, and one of several excellent string quartets will be playing every single Beethoven string quartet in the next couple of weeks, just a few hundred yards from our house.

Somebody pinch me.

For an encore they played part of a string quartet by Juan Crisóstomo Jacobo Antonio Arriaga y Balzola, who heard Beethoven's Op 18 quartets about ten years after they were first performed, and was inspired to write his own. I enjoyed the Arriaga encore quite a bit.

Arriaga died at age nineteen. On the web, people seem to call him the Spanish Mozart. He was born exactly 50 years to the day after Mozart.

Wu Han: "As you listen to the first notes of this string quartet (opus 18, #3), think that these are the first two notes that Beethoven chose for his quartets. It gives me goosebumps."

One web site on Juan Crisóstomo Jacobo Antonio Arriaga y Balzola

(born: Bilbao, 27 Jan 1806; died: Paris, 17 Jan 1826). Spanish composer. He studied under Baillot (violin) and Fétis (harmony) at the Paris Conservatoire; his music, which includes an opera (Los esclavos felices, 1820), a symphony and three fine string quartets, is elegant and accomplished and notable for its harmonic warmth. His death before he was 20 was a sad loss to Spanish music.