Spider silk spun into violin strings

Spiders might soon give you goosebumps in a good way. Strands of spider silk have been used to make violin strings that have a unique and thrilling sound, thanks perhaps to the way the strands deform when twisted.

Shigeyoshi Osaki at Nara Medical University in Japan has studied the properties of spider silk for 35 years. In the past decade he has focused on trying to turn the silk into violin strings, even taking lessons on what was required of a string in terms of strength and elasticity.

Osaki learned how to coax Nephila maculata spiders to spin out long strands of dragline, the strongest form of silk. He bundled filaments together and twisted them, then twisted three of these bundles together to make each string. The thickest of these, the G string, holds 15,000 filaments.

The strings turned out to be tightly packed and strong. The key seems to be that the individual filaments changed shape when twisted: an electron microscope revealed that their circular cross sections turned into polygons, which nestle together more tightly than cylindrical strings.

This came as a surprise. "To my knowledge, no one has observed such a change of cross section. I doubted my experimental results," says Osaki. The spider silk must be deformed by the twisting process.

"The material is a bit squishy, like twisting plasticine," says physicist and violinist Katherine Selby at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Brilliant timbre

Osaki tested the new strings by comparing their performance with three established materials: steel, nylon and gut. He says that the spider silk has a unique and "brilliant" timbre, or quality of tone. You can judge for yourself in this snippet of Tchaikovsky, played by Jun-ichi Matsuda on a Stradivarius violin using all four types of string (see video above).

The timbre seems to result from a difference in how harmonics ? frequency multiples of the main note ? reverberate in the spider silk strings compared with other materials. Spider string has strong high harmonics, while steel and nylon tend to be stronger in low harmonics. Osaki does not yet know what mechanical properties lead to this acoustic performance.

Selby is impressed. "What people crave about natural gut strings is a certain complexity," she says. "Spider strings also have this brilliant sound ? even more than gut."

"It is impressive when you remember these are prototype strings, just out of a material science lab, being compared with commercial strings perfected for years," she adds.

Selby points out that the high strength of spider silk may give it another advantage: "You could have a thinner string for playing the same pitch, which would be a bit more bendy and responsive ? it would hit a note quicker." The material could be especially suitable for thin E strings, which are very fragile when made from gut.

"Is it something all violinists will like? That's an open question. It will have some surface texture, like a rope. Some people may find that off-putting as they slide a hand up and down the neck. I think these will be gourmet strings," Selby adds.

The price will be too steep for most fiddlers in any case, but Osaki is now trying to find a way to produce the strings in larger numbers.

Journal reference: The research has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters

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Iran dismisses execution sentence on U.S.-Iranian (Reuters)

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Reuters - Iran's supreme court on Monday dismissed an execution sentence passed by a revolutionary court against an Iranian-American national accused of spying for the CIA, the semi-official Fars news agency reported.

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Job creation driving highway bills in Congress

WASHINGTON (AP) ? The lure of roads, bridges, buses and trains isn't enough anymore to drive an expensive transportation bill through Congress. So to round up votes, congressional leaders are pitching the bills as the hottest thing around these days: job generators.

But do they really create more jobs? The answer from a lot of economists is not really. The bills would simply shift spending that was creating jobs elsewhere in the economy to transportation industries. That means different jobs, but not necessarily additional ones.

"Investments in transportation infrastructure, if well designed, should be viewed as investments in future productivity growth," said Alice Rivlin, a former director of the White House Office of Management and Budget under President Bill Clinton.

"If they speed the delivery of goods and people, they will certainly do that," she said. "They will also create jobs, but not necessarily more jobs than the same money spent in other ways."

Indeed, the question of job creation is relatively unimportant when compared to other significant economic benefits of maintaining and improving the nation's aging transportation system, such as enabling people to get to work and businesses to speedily move goods, say economists and transportation experts.

But that hasn't diminished the jobs claims being made on Capitol Hill.

"This legislation would put 2 million middle-class Americans back to work right away," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Thursday, as he fumed about nearly 100 amendments that have delayed action on the Senate's version of the transportation bill.

"Although our economy has gained momentum, there are still millions of Americans out of work. So it should be obvious why we can't afford to delay efforts to rebuild our roadways, railways and bridges," he explained.

In the House, Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, made a transportation bill the election-year centerpiece of the GOP's jobs agenda last fall when he unveiled its broad outlines. To make sure nobody missed the point, the bill was dubbed the "American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act of 2012."

Support for the five-year, $260 billion House bill has since fallen apart. Conservatives thought it would spend too much money, and Democrats and some Republicans balked at policy changes they say would undermine mass-transit, weaken environmental protections and penalize union workers. Boehner is struggling to craft a new bill with some mix of policy and spending that can win passage.

Urgency is growing because the government's spending authority for highway and transit programs ? and its legal power to levy most of the 18.4 cents a gallon federal gas tax ? expires at the end of this month. But even if that hurdle is cleared, the trust fund that finances highway and transit programs is expected to go broke sometime next winter.

President Barack Obama has pitched his own six-year, $476 billion transportation bill as a jobs plan as well, but it is obvious lawmakers are unwilling to consider such a large proposal. They've had to scour the federal budget to find money to pay for a Senate bill a quarter of that size. While paying lip service to their own bill, administration officials are also backing the more modest Senate bill, which would cost $109 billion over two years.

"A transportation bill will be the biggest jobs bill Congress could ever pass, bigger than anything else they've done in the three and a half years I've been in this job," Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said, praising the Senate bill.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the chief sponsor of the Senate bill, estimates it will preserve 1.8 million jobs that would be lost if authority to spend trust fund monies expires, and create another 1 million new jobs through a $1 billion loan-guarantee program.

The loan program has been shown to generate as much $30 in private sector investment for every $1 in federal aid. To reach her job estimate, Boxer used that formula, plus Federal Highway Administration estimates that every $1 billion in highway spending creates about 35,000 jobs if it is matched by state and local aid.

Nearly 3 million jobs "are hanging in the balance" as the Senate debates the bill, Boxer said.

But that analysis "assumes that if this bill doesn't pass, all funding ceases, which really isn't a fair assumption," said Joshua Schank, president of the Eno Center for Transportation, a transportation think tank.

It's unlikely that Congress would allow highway and transit aid to lapse even if lawmakers can't agree on a longer-term bill, he said. Rather, he said, they are likely to pass a short-term extension of current programs, as they have done eight times since the last long-term transportation plan expired in 2009.

Also, jobs created by the loan-guarantee program may be a long time coming since the program is aimed at financing major projects, economists said.

"In many cases this is not spending that occurs very rapidly," said Alan Viard, an economist with the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "Anything that involves construction has notoriously long lead times."

A case in point: construction of the interstate highway system began in 1956 and was completed 35 years later.

"How many jobs did we create by building the interstate system?," asked Schank. "Nobody knows. And who cares? We built the interstate system, that's what matters."

___

Follow Joan Lowy at http://www.twitter.com/AP_Joan_Lowy

Associated Press

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They would pound the ripened coffee berries and combine them ...

Coffee ? From Food to Drink.The heritage of the discovery of coffee is rife with speculation. Its transition from food to beverage is equally open to interpretation and historical differences. Early European explorers and botanists believed that Ethiopians chewed raw coffee beans for energy immediately after locating their grazing goats URL eating the coffee berry.

They would pound the ripened coffee berries and blend them with animal excessive fat so they became pasty round pellets. The focus of coffee, weight, and protein became a essential See Page source of electrical power and sustenance, mainly while in lean instances or all through war. The coffee cherries have been also very likely eaten raw because the pulp is sweet and has the added advantage of caffeine.

Early data even indicate that coffee cherries had been put to use to make wine.

Its attainable that coffee was treated as Blog URL meals in Arabia as clearly.

Only later on did the early Arabs use it as a drink. Data present that the earliest version of coffee as a drink took put by steeping entire coffee hulls in cold h2o. The hulls have been then roasted around an open fire, and then boiled once again in h2o right up until a pale yellow liquid was manufactured. By 1000AD, coffee was even now rather rudimentary, consisting of green coffee beans and their hulls.

7 Gains of Eating Natural and organic Meals & Electrical power Drink Recipes For You.

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Lemon Reamers - Home Improvement Products, Kitchen Appliances ...

Most of the people suggest make use of the manual juicer, similar to those for oranges. This possibly will not be mostly realistic. The range of such juicers is likely not to be well suited to petite lemons, and you are further doing several efforts pressing and slanting the lemon to take out its juice. Go to the lemon reamer, possibly one of the simplest equipments to employ in the kitchen place, and surely for the most part efficient manner to find the majority juice from the lemon.

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Republicans start final push toward Super Tuesday (AP)

[unable to retrieve full-text content]AP - A Washington state victory in hand, Mitt Romney is looking ahead to Tuesday's 10-state bonanza that features contests from Alaska to Ohio to Massachusetts, millions in campaign spending and the largest single day of voting yet in the Republicans' topsy-turvy primary race.

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Galaxy S II does work and personal phone duties at once with Telefonica's Dual Persona service

It wasn't so long ago that the corporate world was ruled by RIM, but with the rise of Android and iOS, more folks are wanting to use their personal handsets both for work and play. Enter Telefonica's Dual Persona service that's making its debut on the Galaxy S II. It's powered by VMWare's Horizon Mobile technology that lets you jump between home and work profiles with the tap of an app, and provides notifications for both profiles no matter which one you're currently using. Basically, the work profile is an instance of virtualized Android based in the cloud, meaning your company's IT folks can manage corporate information on your phone without compromising your personal privacy. Samsung plans to give more of its mobile phones Dual Persona in the coming months, so if you don't own a GSII, there's still a chance your phone could get a split-personality, too. PR's after the break.

Continue reading Galaxy S II does work and personal phone duties at once with Telefonica's Dual Persona service

Galaxy S II does work and personal phone duties at once with Telefonica's Dual Persona service originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Mar 2012 04:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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