Science Friday - Glitter, Chestnuts, DNA Data Art, Mistletoe. Dec 23, 2022, Part 2

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

Glitter Gets An Eco-Friendly Glimmer Glitter—it’s everywhere this time of year. You open up a holiday card, and out comes a sprinkle of it. And that glitter will seemingly be with you forever, hugging your sweater, covering the floor. But glitter doesn’t stop there. It washes down the drain, and travels into the sewage system and waterways. Since it’s made from microplastics, it’s never going away. As it turns out, all that glitters is not gold—or even biodegradable. But what if you could make glitter that was biodegradable? Silivia Vignolini, professor of chemistry at the University of Cambridge joins Ira to discuss her latest discovery—eco-glitter made from plant cellulose. The Resurrection Of The American Chestnut At the turn of the 20th century, the American chestnut towered over other trees in forests along the eastern seaboard. These giants could grow up to 100 feet high and 13 feet wide. According to legend, a squirrel could scamper from New England to Georgia on the canopies of American chestnuts, never touching the ground. Then the trees began to disappear, succumbing to a mysterious fungus. The fungus first appeared in New York City in 1904—and it spread quickly. By the 1950s, the fungus had wiped out billions of trees, effectively driving the American chestnut into extinction. Now, some people are trying to resurrect the American chestnut—and soon. But not everyone thinks that’s a good idea. Reporter Shahla Farzan and “Science Diction” host and producer Johanna Mayer bring us the story of the death and life of the American chestnut.   A DNA Map You Can Touch—Or Walk Through When science involves visualizing the intricate movements of DNA through time and space, examining minutiae like how DNA folds and rearranges itself during cell division, or the relationships between miniscule beads on microscopic strings, the data can get complicated really fast. Which is why biophysicist Adam Lamson is collaborating with artist Laura Splan in a project the two of them call ‘Sticky Settings.’ It’s a kind of an inside joke about the nature of DNA strands, and the kinds of digital transformations that can be applied to data in animation software. But the result of this partnership has been anything but a joke. From giant tapestries that present maps of DNA in colorful, tactile formats, to otherworldly animations set to music, their art invites a non-scientific audience to literally walk into the processes our own cells are undergoing every day. Producer Christie Taylor talks with Splan and Lamson about their partnership, and the natural intersection between an artist’s creativity and a scientist’s. Plus how an artist’s interpretation can bring new insights to difficult data.   The Secret Life Of Mistletoe (When It’s Not Christmas) This time of year, it’s not uncommon to see a little sprig of greenery hanging in someone’s doorway. It’s probably mistletoe, the holiday decoration that inspires paramours standing beneath it to kiss. But as it turns out, we may have miscast mistletoe as the most romantic plant of the Christmas season. In reality, the plant that prompts your lover’s kiss is actually a parasite. Ira talks with evolutionary biologist Josh Der about the myth and tradition behind the parasitic plant, and what it may be up to the other 11 months of the year.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Chastnots roasting on an open fire. You've got to admit that when you hear Nat King Cole sing this song, it's probably the only time all year you think about chestnuts, either the roastable delicacy or the chestnut trees themselves. And you know, that's not surprising. The American chestnut tree once towered over the forests of the eastern U.S., growing over a hundred.

feet tall and 12 feet wide. And there were lots of them. So many people like to say a squirrel could go from New England to Georgia leaping chestnut to chestnut without ever touching the ground. But then an invasive fungus wiped them all out, billions of trees gone in the span of a single generation. Now decades later, people are trying to bring them back, using science to resurrect those old giants. But not everybody is happy about it. Last year, reporter Shayla Farsen and Johanna Mayer brought us this story of the vanishing chestnut tree. Back when there were still American chestnuts, every year, the trees produced baskets of rich sweet nuts, each one encased in a spiny jacket. You could eat them right off the tree, or grind them up into flour, or even cook them into toasty little snacks.

People just adore these trees. I've heard people talk about it being, you know, the people's tree, our tree. Susan Frankel is the author of American Chestnut, the life, death, and rebirth of a perfect tree. She says for a lot of people, especially in Appalachia, this tree held a treasured place in their lives. It really was like a member of the family. And when the trees started to disappear, you know, people wept over them. People had pictures in the family scrapbooks of the trees that they would visit each fall to harvest nuts from. And from an industry perspective, the American chestnut was a dream, too. The lumber was light, made it a lot cheaper to ship.

And it was rot resistant, thanks to the high tanning content. And by the late 1800s, Americans were making just about everything out of chestnut. Railroad ties, telegraph poles, church pews, pianos. It really furnished people's lives cradle to gray. People made cradles out of it. They made coffins out of it. But one summer day, in 1904, a forester named Herman Merkel was strolling the grounds at the Bronx Zoo when he noticed something strange. The leaves on one of the chestnut trees were wilted, and when he looked closer, he saw the branches were covered in tiny orange specks.

Merkel didn't know it at the time, but those little dots were from a fungus native to East Asia. No one knows exactly when or how the fungus got to the U.S. But general consensus is that it hitched a ride with a different chestnut species from Japan. And once it landed, it spread. Fast. In 1908, just four years after Herman first noticed those wilted trees, the New York Times ran an article announcing, quote, Chestnut trees are doomed. By 1912, all the chestnuts in New York City.

were dead. And over the next few years, the fungus spread to Pennsylvania and North Carolina and Georgia and Tennessee. By the 1950s, the blight had effectively finished off all the American chestnuts. The fungus spreads through tiny spores that enter the tree through a wound or a little crack in the bark. And then it basically strangles the tree, siphoning off water and nutrients until the tree is dead. Well, mostly dead. Because this fungus doesn't attack the roots, so chestnuts can keep on sending up shoots, which get to a certain size, before eventually the fungus kills them again, and on and on. You can still find thousands and thousands of these small sprouts in the understory, most of them blighted. And again, you know, because they're these sprouts and they're not

producing chest, most of them are not producing chestnuts anymore, we call them. We call them, functionally extinct. Sarah Fitzsimmons is the director of restoration with the American Chessnet Foundation, a nonprofit that's been trying to bring this species back since the 1980s. But people have been trying to save the chestnut for much longer, really, since the blight first landed. First, people tried walling off the fungus. New York and New Jersey's chestnuts were clearly goneers. And in Pennsylvania, the whole eastern part of the state, east of the Susquehanna River, was the lost cause. But west of the river was looking pretty good. So they came up with a plan to cut down vast swaths of trees, create a kind of firebreak.

Except by the time they finished game planning, the fungus had already jumped the river. Strike one. Another option, don't stop the fungus, fix the tree. The American chestnut was basically helpless in the face of the blood. but the Chinese chestnut, it's resistant. So what if you combined the two? It's called bat crossing, creating a hybrid, then breeding that hybrid again and again with a target species.

The idea is to make a tree that's just like an American chestnut, but still has some Chinese chestnut genes that make it resistant to the blight. The problem with that plan, chestnut trees take years to reach maturity. And plant breeding is really slow when you're working on that kind of timeline. It just wasn't sustainable. Strike 2. Then there was the nuclear option. There was irradiation experiments.

That was one of my favorite. It started in the 50s, back when nuclear radiation was on everyone's mind. The idea was that if you irradiated enough chestnut seeds, you'll induce a bunch of mutations. Much like, you know, a thousand monkeys and a thousand typewriters, you know, maybe we'll get a mutation that causes resistant in American chestnuts. Alas. None of the monkeys hit the typewriters. Strike three. Eventually, a team at the State University of New York landed on a new strategy.

Genetic Engineering. It gave them a lot more control than traditional plant breeding. Instead of slowly working toward a lucky genetic combination, they could choose specific genes from other species and put them directly into the chestnut genome, creating a transgenic species. And in time, the Sunni scientists found just the fungus-fighting gene they needed in wheat. When they put that wheat gene in American chestnuts, the seedlings could ward off the fungus, as well as Chinese chestnuts. The team published that work almost a decade ago, back in 2013.

But now, they're facing a new kind of hurdle. The previous ones were primarily scientific and the current one is more political and social that we're now facing in getting these out into the forest. The first turtle bureaucracy. There are three different federal agencies involved in this process. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is involved in approving genetically modified plants. The Environmental Protection Agency is studying the chestnuts possible environmental impact, and the Food and Drug Administration is in charge of reviewing the food safety of transgenic nuts. These agencies probably won't release their decisions before 2023 at the earliest. So, more than a century after that strange orange fungus was spotted in the Bronx,

the American chestnut might be coming back, except some people are wondering, is this even a good idea? It's sort of like, what's the rush? Why the push? Let's make sure we're acting in the tree's best interest. Neil Patterson, Jr., works at the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at SUNY and is a member of the Tuscarora Nation. The Tuscarora are part of a group of six nations known as the Haudenoshone Confederacy. Neal says the American chestnut once played an important role in their lives. The Huda Nishone peoples extracted oil from the nuts or ground them up to make flour. The leaves were used for medicinal purposes, and the wood became the backbone of their longhouses. One of the arguments for restoring the American chestnut,

has been this idea that indigenous peoples could reintegrate it into their traditions. But Neil says he's morally opposed to planting transgenic chestnuts in the wild. He's worried they could affect the forest ecosystem in unexpected ways. And what then? One of the concerns that I'm slowly trying to understand is the potential to recall this technology at some point in the future. The people trying to restore the American chestnut say a lot of work is going into ensuring the trees are ready for release. There's the long governmental review process and a lot of research to back it up. Researchers have studied how the transgenic trees would affect bees, the soil, even tadpoles and water.

And they haven't found any adverse effects. But Neil says even beyond the specific environmental concerns is a deeper question. Whether we should try to restore the chestnut tree just because we can. In other words, should we meddle with the earth? The people who want to preserve the chestnut argue we should. People created this problem. People should fix it. But these kinds of fundamental philosophical questions are the hardest to answer.

In October, Neil Patterson and about a dozen other indigenous people went to pick chestnuts in a small town in upstate New York. The trees were planted about 20 years ago by volunteers from the American Chestnut Foundation. They're not hybrids, not transgenic trees. They're the original. And even though they're struggling with the blight, some trees were just big enough to actually produce nuts. For most of those on the outing that October day, it was their first time picking chestnuts, feeling the spiny burrs prick their fingers. And then it sort of hit me at some point,

To think about this as perhaps the last time Haudunoshone people will gather what we can say fairly certain is our non-transgenic American chestnut. Neil says over the years, some of the history of this tree has been lost. The blight arrived at a time when indigenous children were being sent to boarding schools, told not to speak their native languages. He says some nations don't even have a word in their language for chestnut anymore. Others, like the Tuscarora, are rediscovering it. In my own language, Jitgas. Jitkes is how we say chestnut in Tuscarora. So I've been making it a habit to, when I see a chestnut, call it its real name,

the name that it was meant to hear, Jikas. Now, he says, they're starting to think. think about what to call this new transgenic chestnut, trying to figure out where it fits in. That story was produced by Shayla Farsen and Johanna Mayer, along with Ella Fetter. We have to take a break, and when we come back, what happens when a biologist and an artist conspire inside a shimmering world shaped by DNA? Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Pflato. Imagine walking into an art museum, and seeing scientific data.

But not the usual graphs of the diagrams. Think instead in the form of animated, swirling shapes, gleaming silver DNA strands, hints of green landscapes and blue, cloudy skies. All of this with an eerie instrumental soundtrack that is itself data. Producer Christy Taylor talked to the artist-scientist duo behind something just like that, and she's here to tell us about it. Hi there, Christy. Hey there, Ira. Okay, so you showed me the art we're talking about. It really is very unexpected and beautiful. And I mentioned that there's something that looks like DNA. But what's the science in there? Yeah, the art we're looking at today is part of a project

called Sticky Settings, which is brought to you by biophysicist Adam Lamson and artist Laura Splann. For those listening at home, we do more images on our website for you to take a look at ScienceFriday.com slash sticky art. And to get back to your question, Ira, Adams research is all about DNA, how it arranges itself inside the cell, the way it curls around different proteins, and forms different shapes, and how it even sticks to itself. And that affects all kinds of stuff, like what kind of cell it is, what genes are turned on, that kind of hugely important stuff, right? Right. And this is something that's not necessarily well understood yet,

But Adam and Laura teamed up to work on different ways of visualizing these sticky arrangements. And the result has been pieces that include everything from tapestries to music to some of those stunning animations that you're looking at right now. Here's Laura, the artist, describing one of these animations, which she calls Baroque Bodies ambient portals. So with the Baroque Bodies ambient Portals animation, the first thing you see is this kind of sphere-like form. on this black field that has some colors that you can't quite make out where they're coming from. And inside the sphere, there is a series of kind of spiral-like forms that are moving slowly themselves. And wrapped around those forms is this kind of DNA-looking structure. And all of that is inside this undulating membrane.

and the membrane itself kind of has some color and light that's being reflected off of it, that as you get closer, you can kind of see more kind of identifiable imagery that eventually kind of materializes into a landscape as the animation itself zooms in to reveal reflections on these, what are actually protein. surfaces on the inside of what is actually a nucleosome model. Adam, we've been referring to all of the sort of traces of DNA in the art Laura's made, but you're the one actually studying DNA. Tell us more about your research. I write scientific code in order to model how DNA reorganizes inside of our cell. DNA usually comes in this form known as Crohnitin inside of our cells, which is the DNA gets

wrapped around these proteins. And then you have the DNA and these proteins interacting with each other that organizes everything very regularly inside of ourselves. The interesting thing about that is that we've learned that when DNA becomes close in proximity, or there's different parts of the DNA that when they come together spatially, even though they might be separated by a lot of DNA in between two genes, you can upregulate the gene expression. You can get more RNA coming out of these two genes together than if they were separated.

And likewise, we can also pack DNA away so that no genes are being expressed in certain portions of our genome. So it turns out that it's one of the main ways that cells are able to decide which genes get expressed in our cells versus which are silenced. And that's the kind of thing that helps determine whether a cell becomes a bone cell or an eye cell, or is it something more complicated than that? Every single cell in her body has the DNA to make any other cell. This is why stem cell research is so fascinating is that in order to turn a stem cell into one type of cell, let's say a bone cell or a liver cell versus an eye cell, you have to turn off certain genes and turn on others.

The cells have to make this decision. and they do that by packing away the DNA. Laura, one of the shapes Adams data takes is these things called contact maps, which are graphs of all these points where a strand of DNA may be touching itself, kind of like a tangled up piece of string. What did your mind go through to start turning these graphs, these contact maps, into art? We were introduced to each other and kind of shared our work with each other. And it really was quite immediate that I started to think of ideas of ways that we might collaborate

and think about what those forms might be. For example, when Adam was explaining his research to me, he started pretty early by showing me those contact map visualizations. And the patterns in those contact maps reminded me. of patterns that I'd created using biometric data in some previous work, actually textiles work. And so I immediately knew that I wanted to create leavings out of those contact maps. And they actually are quite direct depictions of Adams' visualizations that are woven on a computerized jacard loom.

We're talking about giant woven squares with diagonal lines running through. them and then sort of these other little dots all around, kind of like a field of stars with different color schemes. What was it like to have this tactile, colorful, gigantic graph to work with? So when I first started on my scientific project, I had to learn how to interpret these contact maps because they gave you the entire spatial information, but in kind of an obtuse way, right? There's some kind of bending and mixing of the DNA thread in space. The translation is not clear. And then I remember one day after a few discussions with Laura,

she brought in these weavings, and it's the biggest contact map that I had ever seen. It was just on a table, and I could put my hands on it. And I had looked at this one picture for hours, I would say, trying to represent it as best as I could and actually seeing this large, I noticed that there was this stripe

running along at a 45-degree angle from the diagonal. And in that moment, it was very clear to me that, oh, this particular section of my filament was in the center. It was surrounded by all these other sections of the DNA,

and this told me a lot more about the overall configuration that I had just never seen. I had started to understand how loops look inside of my simulations or what are known as hairpin configurations, but this was the first time I had an intuitive understanding of like where spatially was located to the rest of

all these other beads in the entire simulation that I had run. You could just, I got really excited and everyone in the room were like, wow, they were, they had like almost kind of like

the look of a parent on Christmas when the child has just seen something for the first time. Like, again, it's one thing to have literal data made into art. But Laura, let's go back to this animation that you were describing earlier. It's like this otherworldly, alien, immersive experience. What went into that? So Ambient Portals was an animation where I was kind of, interested in putting aside the science a bit and allowing the work to kind of to kind of move

into a more science fiction space. But I did begin those animations with an actual nucleosome model that is from the protein data bank. So it is a nucleosome model that has the eight histone proteins on the inside and DNA wrapping around them, and then taking that model and applying a kind of membrane that represented this bead metaphor around it, and then thinking about how I might kind of transcend the science of the model, if you will, and allow for other kind of opportunities for interpretation or narrative to come into this. And so that's where I started. to play with applying these reflective materials to the proteins and the DNA, and then thinking about, well, what is going to be reflected? And with the project, we were playing with this idea

of stickiness that relates to his simulations and models. But we were also thinking a lot about computational biology and tools and technologies used in that. And thinking about this idea of remembered user settings in graphical user interfaces or GUIs in software. And so, you know, one of the things that we talked about with the project and the kind of focus of it was exploring how we might reconnect the computational GUI with the biological gooiness. And so in thinking of that, I started to kind of go this direction of thinking. about environmental influences around the expression of genes. And so I wanted to use AI to generate these environments that are kind of like these

idyllic landscapes that you can never quite get a good look at in the animations because it's always zooming in and out and kind of wandering through the inside of the nucleosome. You know, the more, the closer you look, the more you learn, the more you find, the more you realize there is to still learn and still discover. Lauren, Adam, you also turned this data about DNA into music. What are we hearing? What's going on? So essentially the soundscapes were composed by converting sound files that Adam generated from his simulations into MIDI tracks. and that on some level is the sound of these molecular bodies contacting each other. And it's kind of situated in this liminal space that's biological and technological at the same time.

You can kind of hear these like goopy, drippy sounds that happen at the same time as some of these clicky and beepy technological sounds. And, you know, I really loved the idea of using sound for this because, you know, with sound, its materiality is kind of called into question more easily, and you can't, you know, you can't see it, you can't locate it, and there's a really nice destabilization that happens with sound. So when you hear a lot more activity going on in the sound file, it means that this filament that I'm modeling has started to clump up, has started to become smaller, more condensed, kind of what would happen inside your cell when you're trying to either turn off a gene or bring a bunch of genes together. So you'll sometimes hear that,

you know, there's only one or two things going on at once. And that means that you're kind of in this stretched out kind of state. But then as time goes on, you start to here more and more and more building on top one another, and that's telling you how the fulfillment is coming together and collapsing in on itself. Just a quick reminder that this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. I'm Christy Taylor, talking with artist Laura Splann and biophysicist Adam Lamson about their unique science and arts collaboration.

How are lay people, non-scientists, who have no idea what's going on how are they responding to these works? I've been blown away by how many people just say, wow, that's beautiful. And most of the time you will only see these kinds of patterns and shapes and forms in scientific papers. The first statement they make is like, wow, these are beautiful. You tell them like, yeah, this is for my data. And the immediate next question without even thinking is like, oh, so what does this mean? And that is the jumping off part where I get really excited to be like, okay, so let me tell you.

And I've had to come up with this metaphor of, oh, imagine a book that has just been laid out in a single long line. That's your DNA. And then you're crumpling it all up. And then you spray super glue on it. And then you cut out all the periods. And now you can look at like, oh, sentence from chapter one is close to sentence from chapter five. Right. That tells you that even though those things are not related or not close to each other in the story, they were close to each other in space.

So that was like a really useful analogy And then people start to To come up with their own questions that I haven't thought about It really does play to the human's curiosity Of like you see something that's interesting And then you can't help but ask What does this mean? Okay, one more time with this animation, Laura

I'm looking at it, it's gorgeous, it's beautiful, it's otherworldly There are hints of landscapes, it's a shimmer swirling, swirling, experience. And I'm thinking, wow, this beauty lives in my own body, in my DNA. Was that part of the goal of this project to help people kind of experience the wonders of their own biology? Yeah. So the animations were a really great opportunity to explore all those different layers and all the different complexity of our bodies, but also the beauty of that. And the And I really wanted to kind of create a relationship or a sensation of wonder around that. You know, there can be a sensation of overwhelm that's created when you start to think about the

complexity of biology. But I'm kind of more interested in evoking a sense of wonder. And so, yeah, I really wanted to have there be this aesthetic experience where there was a just kind of an infinite space to inspect and investigate and be curious about. And so, you know, the nucleosome itself and the proteins and the DNA, they, you know, they presented this kind of wonderfully, you know, symmetrical, almost celestial body that I was placing in this kind of cosmic space that, you know, I wanted to kind of play with the movement and the lighting and, you know, the camera angles in a way that created a sense of intimacy that was actually quite inviting and seductive rather than alienating. Laura, Adam, thank you so much for your time today. My pleasure.

Thank you for having us. Dr. Adam Lampson is a fellow in biophysical modeling at the Flatiron Institute in New York, and Laura Splan is a Brooklyn-based multimedia artist. I'm Christy Taylor. Thank you, Christy. And again, you can see some of the really incredible work from Laura and Adam on our website, sciencefriety.com slash sticky art. ScienceFriday.com slash sticky art. We have to take a break, and when we come back, efforts to save the once abundant American chestnut, By chestnuts roasting on an open fire are harder to come by. Stay with us.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Something that may seem familiar this time of the year. What is it? You open up a holiday card and outpours a little unexpected surprise? Glitter. And that glitter will seemingly be with us forever, hugging your sweater, covering the floor. But glitter doesn't just stop there.

It washes down the drain, travels into the sewage system, in the waterways. And since it's made from microplastics, you know it's never going away. So as it turns out, all that glitter is not gold or even biodegradable. But what if you could make glitter that was biodegradable? Sylvia Vignolini, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, has done that, developed eco-friendly glitter made out of plants. Professor Vignolini, thanks for being with us today. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for the invite. Tell us why exactly glitter is so bad for the environment.

The glitter itself is a composite material. So you have a layer of metal, and then on top of it, the very cheap one, you have a layer of plastic, that is where you embed some pigmentation. And they combine the effect of this metal layer with this top layer that has this pigmentation gives you this glittery effect, this metallic effect. This is a typical example of a macroplastic because the size are on the size of few tens of microns, depending on what type of glitter you consider, but the most, the one that are most available and the one most widespread often have this type of problem. You know, there is a lot of glitter that's marketed as

biodegradable or eco-glitter. What's in that stuff? This is actually a little, little bit better because instead in having a plastic that is not degradable, you might find some bioplastics. But you still have the problem of this multiple layering. So you have still a material that is a composite and therefore you have

challenges in recycling, especially if you don't recycle it properly. It'd be hard to recycle glitter, but even if you wanted to, you can't do it. Yes, because it ends up on everywhere. And what about mica? It's also sparkly and it's in a lot of makeup and other beauty products.

Is that better for the environment? Myca is not necessarily bad itself. You know, the only problem of mica is the way that is resourced. So that if you have ethically resourced the mica, because often they exploit child labor to produce mica. But obviously, like, company and they are becoming more and more aware, so they try to resource it in more, you know, in ethical ways. But they still have a little bit the problem that is a highly energy-intensive process

because you really need to make really small flakes out of rocks at the end, like inorganic materials. But it's based on mica, but it's not only mica, yes? So maika is one of the layer of the component. On top of the mica, you might have other materials. and often they also have plastics, polymers. Who thought that glitter was so complex to make? In order to understand why it's complex to make them,

it's important to understand the phenomenon that is behind what makes glitter glittery. So generally when you have a coloration, a color, like the color that you use to paint a wall or to color your clothes, these are traditional pigments. And this pigment, essentially, the coloration, the appearance depends on the chemical characteristic of the material that you have, but the color doesn't change in function of the angle. So in order to have this metallic sparkling

effect, you can do in two ways. One is to use a metal, because metals, they are shiny, and the way that they reflect light with respect to pigment, it's really different. That's why also you can have a mirror. They behave as a mirror metals. Another way is what you put. called structural colors. They don't come from the interaction of the light with the chemical characteristic of the material, but with the physical characteristic of the material. That's like butterfly wings, things like that. Exactly. Exactly. So you need to have a structure on the order of a few hundreds of nanometer that interact with the light with a phenomenon that is called interference,

and this gives rise to this vivid color that are really metallic and really shiny. So let's talk about your achievement now. Given the background of all of this glitter, you've made a new type of glitter that avoids some of those environmental issues using cellulose from wood pulp. What made you think to try and make glitter from plants? Okay. So we saw in nature that cellulose can be used to make colors. That was really my inspiration when I started to work on this system, if you want, almost 10 years. ago. In fact, we discovered that there are several types of plants that can use the cellulose fiber

that are the same fiber that we talk about, that you have a diet that is rich of fibers. So we have observed in nature this type of color in several types of plants, fruits, but also leaves. And it's a really common architecture. And it's a trick that plants use to make color when they cannot make it with pigmentation. So we thought, okay, plants can do it. Maybe we can try our set as well. So how did you extract the cellulose and make it into glitter? So what we use from the cellulose is from

wood pulp or any type of plants biomass that can be also like, we also extracted from grape skin that it's from the waste from wine industry. Or we can also extract it from

cotton linters that are the piece of cotton that cannot be interwoven into yarn. And all these small bits and pieces of cellulose, you can extract what you call the crystalline part. So we call them, it's a type of material that we call cellulose nanocrystal. And nicely enough, when you use this material and you put them in water in the right condition, they can behave as so-called liquid crystals. So the same type of chemical that you have in computer display to make the display. This particle, they have a similar behavior.

So they can form layer structure that are also similar to what you see in the plants that can interact with light to create this coloration. So at the end we simply use this part of the cellulose and exploit this principle that is a spontaneous process that the material does. So it's called self-assembly. But is it as sparkly as the real stuff, as the synthetic? Yes, it is really sparkly. Because it's similar.

The concept is the same of the one that you see in the butterfly wing or in the feathers of a pico. Now the color doesn't depend on the material, but depends on the physical structure. As soon as you are able to physically structure the material in the right way, independently from the material that you use, the chemical composition, you can get really bright color. So what needs to happen before this glitter goes from your lab onto my shelf?

Wow, that's lots of needs to happen. So we got lots of interest also from the media, and then obviously many companies contacted us. Our technology, if you want, is based on this self-assembling. And this self-assembly mechanism, especially using biomaterial, is not really well-developed in industry as a process. Because it has some disadvantages. It is slow with respect to conventional manufacturing method that are used now to make pigment and glitter.

It's a bit slower. And therefore, as a technology, is a little bit disruptive with respect what is present today. So you first need to convince the company, the manufacturing company, that it's actually a process that it's economically viable. Because at the end of the day, it's sad to say, but I don't know how many people would be happy. to pay lots of money for buying glitter that is more sustainable. Yeah, so you have to bring the price down and when you make it. Exactly. You need to make the material that is compelling also from a point of view of economic

point of view. And the raw material is not expensive because it's cellulose itself and actually the fact that you can get it from waste, it makes it even more attractive. But the processing at the moment is expensive. and in order to really being able to sell it on a commercial level, there is a lot of more technical challenges that needs to be addressed in question of producing it on a really large scale.

Well, New Year's Eve isn't too far off where we'll see confetti and streamers and Times Square and all over the world. Now, here's a question. Is it possible to make all this streaming stuff biode? degradable. Why not? Last year, we heard about biodegradable glitter. Yeah, it is possible. The question is, like, again, it's question of will and question of how much people that want to also to invest and they are ready to change this technology for something that it's a little

bit more sustainable. Obviously, you know, it's always, I think it's also always important to remember that you are always creating an impact with what you disperred around. Yes. So you produce more waste. It's true that even if it's biodegradable, it's better. But it's still going to take some time to degrade. Yes. And it's still going to probably affect the environment that you have around.

So even if you have a material that is essentially inert like cellulose, If you imagine to, and it's degraded by many different macroorganism, if you accumulate large amount, a large mass of one specific material in a place, you might alterate the ecosystem of that specific area. You will have an environmental impact. So my suggestion is that we shouldn't live a life of where we restrain ourselves, in everything, but we should also be a little bit more aware that everything that we do is impacting our environment, and we should try to limit to what is really necessary and trying to,

you know, trying to be more or, you know, to use it, but in special occasion and not be everything that is a consumer that then it goes in the bin, and because it's written bio, we are, we are happy with it and we don't think about it anymore. Well, Dr. Vignolini, we wish you great success and hopefully, and next New Year's Eve, we'll be able to see biodegradable, confetti, glitter, streamers, all that kind of

stuff. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Thank you. We have a nice evening. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. This time of the year, it's not uncommon to see little sprigs of greenery hanging at a holiday party. You know what I'm talking about? Of course, it's mistletoe,

waiting for someone to be kissed beneath it. The amorous life of this indoor mistletoe is a lot cheery than what mistletoe does in the wild. You see, the plant that prompts that kiss is actually a parasite, feeding off other plants. Here to tell us more about this plant and what it's up to the other 11 months of the year is my guest, Dr. Josh Durr, Associate Professor of Biological Science at Cal State Fullerton. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. Now, I consider myself a bit of a plant geek, but I was even surprised to hear about parasitic plants. I didn't know there was such a thing.

Yeah, parasitic plants are fascinating. Tell us about what makes this plant a parasitic plant. What makes mistletoe a parasite? Well, so mistletoes attach onto the branches of other shrubs and trees, and they steal mostly water, but some also steal nutrients and sugars, and they rely on their hosts in order to complete their life cycle. They've got really specialized modified roots in order to help them attach, and get into the host's vascular tissue. And they also have specialized dispersal mechanisms

to get the seeds to the next tree. You can imagine it's hard to get from one tree to another without some help. You make this sound like it's a scary plant to be standing under. It's not really. These parasites do steal water and nutrients from their hosts,

but they don't usually damage the trees enough to kill them unless the infestation is bad. and they're not going to really hurt you unless you eat them. A lot of them are poisonous. I love to grow plants. I grow orchids and other kinds of plants, tough plants. How tough would it be for me to grow my own mistletoe at home? It would be pretty challenging.

You'd first need to have a suitable host, and once you've got a host, you'll need to establish an infection. And you can do that. You can put seeds of a mistletoe. onto the branches of your tree. But mistletoe, at least the ones we use in our decorations, grow very slowly. They take several years to establish an infection. And then if you're going to be harvesting it, you're going to not want to destroy the mistletoe by taking all of it.

Right. Tell us how mistletoe got associated, this plant that you use the word infection associated with it because it's a parasite. how it could get involved with being a loving thing if it's a parasite? Yeah, that's a great question. Mistletoe has a long history in mythology and lore. It's featured in stories from Norse mythology and Greek mythology, and the druids revered it as a sacred plant. It traces its history as a Christmas decoration back to pagan rites in pre-Christian Europe.

And it was one of the few green things available in the winter. And so people would bring it in as a reminder of spring. And it became associated with fertility. And for that reason, it is also used in that tradition you mentioned at the start of the segment, kissing under the mistletoe. How did you get started with studying mistletoe? It's not something I would think, you know, you did your PhD thesis. on this. Did you not? I worked on mistletoes for my master's. But I was interested in mistletoes and parasitic plants because of their specialization and how they have this alternative

life history of stealing resources, but also being really important ecologically. And so I've continued to work on it since getting my PhD. And I studied that. Did you find a, your favorite? Do you have a favorite one? Sure. So I really like dwarf mistletoes. They have a very specialized seed dispersal mechanism where they launch their seeds out of the fruit all on their own. And those seeds then attach into the host. And the mistletoe actually grows for several years inside of the host, much like an alien infesting someone. And when they're ready to reproduce, they burst out of the stem. And they've got these small, tiny flowers, and then they make their fruits and launch those fruits to the next tree.

Launch you pretty far? Pretty fast? They can launch up to 30 meters or so. Have you ever seen one bursting out of the tree? I have. Sometimes when they're just right, you can tap them a little bit, and you can get them to launch the seeds. Wow. No wonder you're so interested in it.

It's fascinating. I wish you good luck on your career studying mistletoe. Thank you. Josh Sturr, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Cal State Fullerton. And that about wraps up, gift wraps, this show in our holiday package. If you missed any part of this program, you'd like to hear it again. Subscribe to our podcasts or ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. You can, of course, say hi to us all week on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,

or you can contact us the old-fashioned way, SciFri at ScienceFriday.com. Have a great holiday week. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.