I like knitting, math, and uplifting the proletariat.

Old account: @MxRemy@lemmy.one (if lemmy.one hasn’t died yet)

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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 5th, 2024

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  • Ok, take this with a grain of salt because I read about it ages ago in a dubious pop-sci book and my memory is shaky. One time, they tried to gene edit yeast to be able to survive much higher alcohol concentrations. There’s lots of good reasons to want to do this… Beer/wine is just about the strongest beverage you can make without distillation of some kind because the yeast dies. Making way higher ethanol yields just from fermentation makes biofuel way more viable. Stuff like that.

    EXCEPT… It nearly escaped, and was able to survive on it’s own. Yeast is very ubiquitous in nature, so a wild yeast that can tolerate massive ethanol concentrations could conceivably have altered life on earth as we know it.

    A cursory internet search isn’t turning up anything about this, but I’m pretty sure I read it in the book Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody, if anyone wants to look harder than I did.




















  • Wow, AND it broke despite being one of the strongest types of spider web! On the other hand, I think the way they plied it is not how things are supposed to be done, for good reason. Correct plying ought to make a world of difference. From what i saw in the video, it only seems like a lot of web if it needs to be continuous. To make yarn, it’s not at all atypical to spin many shorter fibers together rather than few long ones. And caterpillar tents are super abundant! The differences in strength between insect webs might still be a real issue though.

    Somebody else mentioned that they think caterpillar tent silk just balls up into a big stacky wad, so you might need to submerge it in something that would cut the stickiness first. That also made me think of another possibility. What if, instead of spinning it as-is, you dissolved it in a solvent and then electrospun it onto a rotating spool? And then plied the result?