Silkworms. They're the caterpillars of the domesticated silk moth. Silk quickly became one of the most valuable materials in the land.It dressed emperors and spurred trade connecting East Asia and Europe.
She is also the author of two other books published in the UK, and most recently, the book that we will be discussing today, "Silk -- A World History," which you should be sure to get anywhere books are sold. But without further ado, Dr. Aarathi, it's my pleasure to welcome you to Talks at Google.
Now the Chinese government is investing billions-- trillions even-- in building a new maritime and also the road-- Silk Road-- to try and increase its trade passages and also increase its influence as well.All of this-- and you add in all the companies and the mergers and acquisitions going on as well.
And then word goes to that farm and says, hold that lot. Silk Road Teas is taking that lot.I think it's indicative of China that there is just a vast amount of tea that comes out of the mountains--
And it's a wonderful thing to write a lyric because you have this prompt. Silk flowers scattered here and there in twists of dark hair, fresh from her crisis and still prone to sudden tears.
And so I encouraged her to paint an enormous silk scarf, a gigantic silk scarf, because Miriam Rothschild wears silk scarves. And she painted nine different species of flea, hugely magnified images of fleas on this scarf.And I sent it off with a covering note explaining about the charity.
And I thought of the story of one of them in the modern world today of this stuff called sea silk . Silk from the sea.And lost of ancient stories have been told about stuff called sea silk , which comes from a shell called the noble pen shell, which grows in the Mediterranean.
We would not allow fully automatic machine guns, or RPGs to be sold on the web, or large quantities of meth. Silk Road is now closed down for that reason.But we do allow 100,000 girls each year, approximately-- underage girls-- to be sold on the web, on organizations like BackPage.
But the biggest advantage, and probably the reason leading to the evolution of major ampullate silk , is that if things get too hairy with the predator, they can dive out on their safety line.So it allows you to-- oh, now, the powder here is adhering to another araneomorph innovation called
And tips, that's really interesting. Silk Road, that's amazing.
to me i had a little idea of what he was referring to but for example let's say president grant so it was a beautiful beautiful silk menu when the king of hawaii came to visit the white house well hawaii wasn't part of the united statesand the king came over here he wanted the united states investing in sugar
This was silk . Whether or not that story's true, people eventually learned to farm the insect that made the thread. Silkworms. They're the caterpillars of the domesticated silk moth. Silk quickly became one of the most valuable materials in the land.
They returned with a secret hidden inside their hollow canes. Silkworm eggs. This may be the first recorded case of industrial espionage in history. With that, Byzantium could finally make its own silk .
And it kind of gives you this luscious, creamy, melt in your mouth texture. Silken tofu is wonderful for desserts like that. And then, for me, a perfect chocolate dessert has the richness of dark chocolate, but then something a little bit tart to balance that.
So we work with a large cooperative, and we probably source from a dozen different small organic farmers. Silken tofu. OK. Now, to make it in a block a tofu, I break that up.
But what I'll show you when we get this going is that there's a sequential evolution of spider silks . Silks that they still use now.And those can be examined and characterized, and so you can actually see the genetic changes that lead to functional changes that then lead to an increased
headquarters was too porous for them to secure so we couldn't have it there so they decided to have it at the homeboys silkscreen Factory which is kind of off campus if you will in a little factory among factories and it was unbelievable on the day of her visit you know was bomb sniffing dogs there were sharpshooters on the roofs of
And it's the Holy Grail of silks because it's incredibly strong. Moth silk 's strong, but spider silk is incredible. It is said that if a spider was the size of a human being, then the web it makes will be strong enough
People are working on replacements for cartilage and bone because at the moment, you implant metal into you, don't you? But silk , remember, is a natural animal protein. And the kind of route that they're taking is also to be able to tell that silk , if you 3D-print a silk scaffold,
also for people like Professor Fritz Vollrath at the University of Oxford, who worked with spider silk but also the silk of nearly anything. So silk , you can make a biopolymer.
also for people like Professor Fritz Vollrath at the University of Oxford, who worked with spider silk but also the silk of nearly anything. The silk would not be damaged when a bullet hit it.
But now the whole globe, through internet commerce, is a large market. of silk cloth. But the US doesn't produce silk .
But now the whole globe, through internet commerce, is a large market. And silk was very much associated with the East, but it also was something that became something that a middle-class American woman would
But Silk Road's gone.
aerial silk dancer, gold miner, single-handed sailor, fisherman.
The Silk Road is remarkably innovative.
So it allows you to-- oh, now, the powder here is adhering to another araneomorph innovation called cribellate silk . So the araneomorph spiders will lay down the major ampullate catching lines, and at the same time, they have a spinning organ called a cribellum that emits tiny fibrils of silk .
white silk shirt a fox fur mantle and a livery collar from which was suspended a diamond the size of a walnut his wide
releases silk from a labial and now she's moved back forth back and forth back and forth in this way the lease are
aerial silks , with acrobats throwing each other across the stage, and performing these death drops that are sliding headfirst down the big top pole.
Do silkworms have feelings?
the silks with sleeves so tight that it's impossible to raise one spoon to one's carefully tinctured lips.
the silky texture.
It sounds like something straight out of a comic book. But real spider silk , the fiber that makes up a spider's web, well, it truly might be this incredible. It's reportedly stronger than steel. It's pretty strong.
To find out if that's really true, I went to the Blackledge Spider Lab at the University of Akron, one of the world's leading research centers studying spider silk . Before I went to the lab, I'd always assume that a spiderweb was made from just one kind of silk . But that's actually not the case.
But that's actually not the case. One type of silk anchors the web to a surface. Another forms this stretchy spiral, and a different sticky silk catches prey.
And so it helps to slowly decelerate the insect so that the web has time to stick to it, and keep the meal for the spider to subdue. - So the spider silk has to be quite stretchy. - This piece of silk stretched to 70% of its length before it broke, which is really exceptional for dragline silk .
- So the spider silk has to be quite stretchy. - This piece of silk stretched to 70% of its length before it broke, which is really exceptional for dragline silk . - Now, every tiny bit of stretching absorbs a little bit of energy.
Experimental ultra-high strength steel has a toughness of around 170 megajoules per cubic meter. But spider silk ? - This piece of silk had a toughness of about 205 megajoules per cubic meter. - Oh, okay. So that might be like four times Kevlar.
- Oh, okay. So that might be like four times Kevlar. But the silk from the Darwin's bark spider can have a peak toughness of 520 megajoules per cubic meter. That's roughly three times the strongest steel out there, and 10 times as tough as Kevlar.
See, Kevlar has a very high tensile strength, but it's also quite stiff. Compared with stretchy spider silk , that means that the stress/strain graph rises sharply and fails before it can stretch very far. So it's not able to absorb as much energy.
more than a million golden orb weaver spiders in the jungle by hand. They extracted their silk and painstakingly wove and embroidered it into a single golden cape. Why hadn't they tried farming the spiders instead?
So around the same time, a Canadian company called Nexia tried something much stranger. They put spider silk genes into goats, creating genetically modified spider goats. No, no, really, they made spider goats.
- And that's one of the secrets that any company that really wants to mimic spider silk at an industrial scale needs to kind of figure out is how to process silk proteins the way spiders do. - But that's easier said than done.
These globules next enter the spinning duct. - For the dragline silk , the duct is kind of S-shaped, but it gets skinnier and skinnier. - As the globules go through the narrow duct, the liquid near the walls rubs against the surface, and it moves more slowly,
So long that it stretched across her entire garden. This was silk . Whether or not that story's true, people eventually learned to farm the insect that made the thread. Silkworms. They're the caterpillars of the domesticated silk moth.
- To push the 60% average even higher, the insertion needs to be more targeted. - This is spider silk .
- To push the 60% average even higher, the insertion needs to be more targeted. This is transgenic spider silk .
- To push the 60% average even higher, the insertion needs to be more targeted. - And this is silk from that.
- To push the 60% average even higher, the insertion needs to be more targeted. Granted this spider silk came from other organisms, but...