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Spider silk spun into violin strings
TOMOKO OTAKE/The Japan Times
UPFRONT
Spider silk’s thrilling tone SPIDERS can now give you goosebumps in a good way. This violin owes its thrilling sound to its strings – the first to be spun from spider silk. Shigeyoshi Osaki at Nara Medical University in Japan coaxed Nephila maculata spiders to spin out long strands of dragline, the strongest form of silk. He bundled filaments together and twisted them, then twisted these bundles together to make each string. The thickest, the G string, contains 15,000 filaments. Compared with strings made of steel, nylon and gut, Osaki says that the spider silk has a unique and “brilliant” timbre, or tone. This may be because the individual filaments change shape when twisted: an electron microscope revealed that their circular cross-sections turn into
polygons, which nestle together more tightly than cylindrical filaments. Osaki will publish the findings in Physical Review Letters. “What people crave about natural gut strings is a certain complexity,” says physicist and violinist Katherine Selby at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “Spider strings also have this brilliant sound – even more than gut.” The strings may also allow the same pitch to be played on a thinner string, “which would be a bit more bendy and responsive”, Selby adds. Judge the sound yourself in a snippet of Tchaikovsky, played by Jun-ichi Matsuda on a Stradivarius violin using all four types of string (newscientist.com/article/dn21540). Violinists be warned: spider silk strings will not come cheap.
Deadly flu – or not?
windpipe. This site has been shown to be the best for testing potential virulence in humans. Still, the findings suggest that this mutant would not escape and “spread like wildfire”, Fouchier said. His arguments appear to be aimed at countering fears about publishing the research and continuing it. The US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity has said the work should not be published in full, but will now debate it again. Meanwhile, measures to keep viruses escaping the lab will be strengthened.
–Spun strings, silky skills–
Boson boosts Higgs
“The Tevatron was turned off in September but researchers are still combing through its data” previous estimate was 80.4 GeV, give or take 0.045 GeV. Thanks to relationships laid out in the standard model of physics – our best picture of the menagerie 4 | NewScientist | 10 March 2012
Jurgen Freund /NaturePL
EVEN from beyond the grave it is possible to help tease apart the nature of matter. Newly processed measurements from the now defunct Tevatron particle collider have led to the most precise estimate yet of the mass of the W boson. That in turn constrains the mass of the long-sought Higgs boson. The Tevatron was housed at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, and turned off in September 2011, but researchers are still combing through the data it produced. Their latest sums, combined with earlier data from other detectors, place the W boson’s mass at 80.385 gigaelectronvolts, plus or minus 0.015 GeV. The
of particles and forces that make up the universe – the improved W boson mass hones estimates for the mass of the Higgs, the missing piece of the standard model. Last December, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, announced hints of a Higgs with a mass of about 125 GeV. The new W boson mass boosts confidence in that result, as it is consistent with a Higgs weighing between 115 and 127 GeV. “It’s all fitting together nicely,” says Dmitri Denisov of DZero, one of the Tevatron’s two main detectors.
YOU could be forgiven for being confused about bird flu this week. Recent research showed that a few mutations would allow H5N1 bird flu to spread through the air between mammals. Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who created the mutated virus, said last year that it was deadly. He has now told a biodefence meeting in Washington DC that the virus did not kill the ferrets that inhaled it. However, it did kill every ferret that had virus placed directly in it
Superfast acid rise IT IS nothing to boast about, but our greenhouse gas emissions may be acidifying the oceans faster than at any time in the last 300 million years. The sheer speed means we do not know how severe the consequences will be. As well as warming the planet, carbon dioxide seeps into the oceans and makes the water more acidic. The pH is now dropping by about 0.1 per century, harming –The sea is changing at record rates– shelled organisms like corals and
UPFRONT
Spider silk’s thrilling tone SPIDERS can now give you goosebumps in a good way. This violin owes its thrilling sound to its strings – the first to be spun from spider silk. Shigeyoshi Osaki at Nara Medical University in Japan coaxed Nephila maculata spiders to spin out long strands of dragline, the strongest form of silk. He bundled filaments together and twisted them, then twisted these bundles together to make each string. The thickest, the G string, contains 15,000 filaments. Compared with strings made of steel, nylon and gut, Osaki says that the spider silk has a unique and “brilliant” timbre, or tone. This may be because the individual filaments change shape when twisted: an electron microscope revealed that their circular cross-sections turn into
polygons, which nestle together more tightly than cylindrical filaments. Osaki will publish the findings in Physical Review Letters. “What people crave about natural gut strings is a certain complexity,” says physicist and violinist Katherine Selby at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. “Spider strings also have this brilliant sound – even more than gut.” The strings may also allow the same pitch to be played on a thinner string, “which would be a bit more bendy and responsive”, Selby adds. Judge the sound yourself in a snippet of Tchaikovsky, played by Jun-ichi Matsuda on a Stradivarius violin using all four types of string (newscientist.com/article/dn21540). Violinists be warned: spider silk strings will not come cheap.
Deadly flu – or not?
windpipe. This site has been shown to be the best for testing potential virulence in humans. Still, the findings suggest that this mutant would not escape and “spread like wildfire”, Fouchier said. His arguments appear to be aimed at countering fears about publishing the research and continuing it. The US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity has said the work should not be published in full, but will now debate it again. Meanwhile, measures to keep viruses escaping the lab will be strengthened.
–Spun strings, silky skills–
Boson boosts Higgs
“The Tevatron was turned off in September but researchers are still combing through its data” previous estimate was 80.4 GeV, give or take 0.045 GeV. Thanks to relationships laid out in the standard model of physics – our best picture of the menagerie 4 | NewScientist | 10 March 2012
Jurgen Freund /NaturePL
EVEN from beyond the grave it is possible to help tease apart the nature of matter. Newly processed measurements from the now defunct Tevatron particle collider have led to the most precise estimate yet of the mass of the W boson. That in turn constrains the mass of the long-sought Higgs boson. The Tevatron was housed at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, and turned off in September 2011, but researchers are still combing through the data it produced. Their latest sums, combined with earlier data from other detectors, place the W boson’s mass at 80.385 gigaelectronvolts, plus or minus 0.015 GeV. The
of particles and forces that make up the universe – the improved W boson mass hones estimates for the mass of the Higgs, the missing piece of the standard model. Last December, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland, announced hints of a Higgs with a mass of about 125 GeV. The new W boson mass boosts confidence in that result, as it is consistent with a Higgs weighing between 115 and 127 GeV. “It’s all fitting together nicely,” says Dmitri Denisov of DZero, one of the Tevatron’s two main detectors.
YOU could be forgiven for being confused about bird flu this week. Recent research showed that a few mutations would allow H5N1 bird flu to spread through the air between mammals. Ron Fouchier at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who created the mutated virus, said last year that it was deadly. He has now told a biodefence meeting in Washington DC that the virus did not kill the ferrets that inhaled it. However, it did kill every ferret that had virus placed directly in it
Superfast acid rise IT IS nothing to boast about, but our greenhouse gas emissions may be acidifying the oceans faster than at any time in the last 300 million years. The sheer speed means we do not know how severe the consequences will be. As well as warming the planet, carbon dioxide seeps into the oceans and makes the water more acidic. The pH is now dropping by about 0.1 per century, harming –The sea is changing at record rates– shelled organisms like corals and