Science Friday - Sand Sustainability, Jane Goodall, Morphing Pasta, Cicada Snacks. May 28, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

Shifting The Sand Business To Greener Practices Sand is one of the most in-demand natural materials on the planet—some 50 billion tons of sand and gravel are mined every year. It’s because the humble sand is a key ingredient in many materials, from concrete and asphalt to microchips and glass. But sand is also heavy, needed in large quantities, and costly to ship—meaning that in some regions, local demand for sand outstrips supply. A ‘sand mafia’ exists in parts of the globe, and in others, international conflicts have arisen over accusations of illicit cross-border beach theft.Dr. Aurora Torres, a postdoctoral researcher in Michigan State University’s Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability and at the Catholic University of Louvain, joins host John Dankosky to talk about ways to make the business of sand extraction more ecologically-friendly—from manufacturing sand via high-tech rock crushing machines to reducing demand by recycling construction materials.  A Trip Back In Time With Jane Goodall On September 27, 2002, Ira sat down for his first interview with the pioneering conservationist and primatologist Jane Goodall, to hear about her life, work, and vision for our relationship with our environment. Goodall is the 2021 recipient of the prestigious Templeton Prize for her work with animals and her contributions to humanity. When this interview originally aired, Goodall was already 40 years distant from her initial breakthrough discovery of tool use in chimpanzees, was the subject of a newly released IMAX movie, and had just been named a UN Ambassador for Peace. Learn more about her in the latest Science Friday Rewind, a series exploring historic interviews and scientific discoveries captured in our audio archives. A Bowl Full Of Pasta Engineering When you walk down the pasta aisle at the supermarket, there are so many tasty choices: There’s the humble spaghetti, the tubes of ziti, the tiny shells, and the butterfly-like farfalle. But every pound of pasta is not created equal—some of the boxes pack mostly air.In recent work published in the journal Science Advances, Dr. Lining Yao of Carnegie Mellon’s Morphing Matter Lab and her colleagues discuss an innovative way to solve the problem of puffed-up pasta boxes: What if different pasta shapes could be flat-packed into containers like DIY IKEA furniture?   The researchers developed a way to map out tiny grooves and ridges on the surface of a flat noodle sheet. When the pasta is cooked in hot water, it swells at different rates around the ridges and grooves, causing it to fold on its own into shapes such as boxes, rose-like flowers, and helix curls. Yao joins SciFri’s Charles Bergquist to talk about the research, and the challenges of making your dinnertime pasta plate into an origami craft project.  How To Take A Bite Of The Brood X Cicada Swarm After 17 years underground, billions, maybe even trillions, of cicadas are finally emerging in a group that scientists are calling Brood X. The cicadas will mate and die all within about six weeks—filling the air with a collective hum, and leaving behind their exoskeletons.  For some this might sound like a horror movie, but for Bun Lai, chef at Miya’s Sushi in Connecticut, he sees this as an opportunity for a sustainable snack. He talks about how to hunt and cook a cicada, and how they fit in as a sustainable food source.         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 John Dankoski. Irafledo is away. Later this hour, we'll take a trip back to a classic interview with Jane Goodall, and we'll put some cicadas on your menu. But first, you've heard the expression as numerous as the stars in the sky or the grains of sand on the seashore. But sand isn't actually in unlimited supply across the globe, and our demand for it keeps growing, for everything from the sidewalks under your feet to the glass screen on your phone. There's no danger of planet Earth running out of sand, of course, but the economics and the ecological impacts of the sand industry are shifting. Joining me now to talk about the ecology of sand is Dr. Aurora Torres.

She's a postdoc in the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at Michigan State University and at the Catholic University of Levin in Belgium. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. Let's get a definition first. What do we mean when we say sand? What is it? It's simply a matter of size.

Sun is defined by a specific grain size. So from 16 to 1 to 2 millimeters, it's just very fine grains but define what sand is. But actually, the composition or the shape can differ. It can be made from natural materials, from fragments of rocks and minerals, but it can be also made by pressing plastics or recycle concrete and mortar.

Not all sand is the same, and I think that we all have this experience, if we walk on a beach on the Mediterranean or we walk on the beach in the northeast, the sand under our feet is a little different. Is there good and bad sand for different types of uses? Yes, so it depends on what is the final use of sand. For many different types of applications, we don't have to be very strict about the quality of the sand.

But for certain things like producing glass or for the microprocessors that power our cell phones, then we need a very high quality of sand that is quartz sand, almost basically 100% of quartz. If we're going to make sidewalks or we're going to make a building out of concrete, what type of sand do you want? Where do you want that sand to come from? It can be from a multitude of places. Many people think that the ideal type of sand comes from river, but actually we can make crossrock that can be of similar or even higher quality that the sand that we find in the river,

because we have better control over the sizes of the grains, the distribution of the grains in the sample, the shape we can make angular sand or more round sand, on the use. So mainly speaking, that type of sand that we use for concrete is coming from rivers, flood plains, glacial deposits, and cross rock. Let's say you take sand from the Sahara Desert. Is that something that you can build a building out of? It's not the ideal type, and it will require a lot of processing to be able to use desert sand. Many teams are looking for opportunities to do that possible for the places that are next to the deserts, of course. But in principle, it's difficult

because the grains of sand have been eroded by the action of the wind and they are very round. And also, if you look through the microscope, it's like all the grains of sand look the same. While ideally, what we will expect to find for a good mix of sand to make concrete is a diversity of grain sizes with different shapes and slightly different sizes. And we don't find that in desert sand. So that's why this is not an ideal type of source. So you're saying that sand that's uniform in size and shape doesn't make good construction materials, but sand that's diverse in its size and its different qualities, that makes better construction material. Why is that? If the grains are very round, then the mix is not strong enough and the concrete kind of collapse.

So for the mix to stay together, you need these angular grains of sand. But it also gets complicated because if it's so angular, then it might not be that good. So it has to be within a certain range. Do we know how much sand is on the planet? No, we don't know. That's still a question that is yet to be answered. There is no geological assessment of deposits under uncertainty that has been conducted. So we don't know.

We think it's very abundant. if in general, geologically speaking, is widely distributed on land, on fresh water system in coastal areas. But we don't know how much sand there is and how much sand of different qualities is on the planet. So when we say that there's a sand crisis, I mean, there's no real chance of running out because we do have a lot of sand. So what are we talking about around a crisis of sand? So it's mainly our relationship with sand, what is changing. Sand is a material that has been used for construction for very long time. The Egyptians started to make a type of concrete, the Romans, perfection, the technique,

but it has been since the 50s, 70 years ago, that with population growth, urban development, and infrastructure development, the extraction of sand and gravel has accelerated to the point that these are now the most extracted materials in the world beyond fossil fields and by biomass, we extract 50 billion tons of sand and gravel every year. And then this is bringing environmental and socioeconomic implications. So that's why we talk about a global sand crisis. Demand for oil may be slowing down because we're finding other ways to power ourselves. Are there alternatives to sand that people are looking at in order to stop this looming crisis? Yeah, that's very interesting because making this comparison, as we are transitioning now from gas and fuels to renewable energies,

not because we completely run out of these materials, but because of the environmental implications, we are trying to find secondary resources that can replace sand and gravel found in river systems that are highly vulnerable. And the main substitute to sand and gravel is crossrook, And this is already the main source of aggregates in places like the United States or in Europe. And we are seeing an increasing adoption of this type of production that is basically come from blasting and crescent rocks of different types. Granite, sandstone, basalt, a wide diversity of rocks can be used for that purpose. And we also see a widening range of secondary resources that can be used to satisfy the demand for aggregates. The main one is recycled construction and demolition waste, but in the future, there will be probably increased adoption of recycled, plastic, byproducts of steel production, byproduct of other mining industries.

So there is potential for reducing the demand for primary materials. You mentioned that Sanders is so in demand around the globe and it's so heavily extracted. we made the comparison to the oil industry. Are we seeing wars over sand the same way that we have seen wars over oil? Well, it has certainly become an issue that has created geopolitical conflicts. One of the clearest one is in Singapore that has been growing by 23% in the last decades because of massive land reclamation projects for urban development. And this has created conflicts with the countries in Southeast Asia nearby Singapore

because Singapore just doesn't have enough materials for all this construction that is going on. So it has to rely to a certain percentage on importing these materials from neighbor countries, from Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia. Singapore was accused of stealing sand from islands in Indonesia and a total of 20. 23 island disappeared in a very short period of time. And after that, Indonesia accused Singapore of this illegal extraction. And there has been a succession of exporting bans to Singapore because of accusations of environmental impacts associated with this extraction.

And also within countries, we have seen that as sand mining has become increasingly profitable, and when there is not a strong governance in place, many illicit supplied networks have emerged. And one of the best examples is in India where there are multiple operating Indian sand mafias taking control of these resource and threatening local communities and also being in blame of murdering hundreds of people in the last years in Sand Wars. That's extraordinary. Sand mafias.

It's really surprising. And it's not only in India that happens, but also, In China, in Kenya, in Baja California, there are problems also of illegal mining. So it's quite an extended problem when there is weak governance and a very high demand. What do you think we can do to make sand more sustainable? I think we need a more careful monitoring and planning of the resources that we have. We need a better understanding of the physical system. So to put it in simple terms, to know what the geological,

resources are and to understand the extraction flows and how they accumulate on urban areas, because in the future, it might be secondary resources. And in this physical system, we should also get an understanding of the secondary resources that are available in a given place that we might be able to access in order to promote a transition towards a more circular economy that increased the efficiency in the use of the materials and reduce the reliance of the primary materials. But there is also a bit of an uncomfortable truth that was highlighted by a report of the International Resource Panel last year.

In this report, they concluded that material efficiency strategies in the construction sector can achieve gains in terms of reducing climate change emissions. But the ones that are going to be really more influential, are the ones that require a societal transformation. So moving into more lifestyles that require less material. And interestingly, that goes against the tide of ongoing urban sprawl and increasing floor area per capita that is expected to double in the next year.

So unless we couple efforts in technical measures with social measures, we might be eating up what we gain by, increase in material efficiency. So, yeah, that's something we need to find out how to make that societal transition towards decreasing the material demand per capita. Dr. Aurora Torres is a postdoc in the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability at Michigan State University and at the Catholic University of Lovain. Thank you so much for joining me today.

I really appreciate it. My pleasure. Thank you so much. Coming up after the break, it's time for a sci-frost. Rewind. We'll dip into the archives and revisit the life and work of Jane Goodall with Dr. Goodall herself. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankowski. More than 60 years ago, a young scientist named Jane Goodall first set foot in what is now the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. She'd go on to make groundbreaking observations of chimpanzee behavior, including tool use, personality traits,

and even the darker, more aggressive side. Since then, she's gone on to advocate for environmental conservation and for a view of nature that places us within the animal kingdom. Late last week, it was announced that she was this year's winner of the prestigious Templeton Prize for her work changing our view on animal and human society. So we thought it was a good time for a sigh-fri rewind. Ira interviewed Dr. Goodall for the first time in September of 2002.

they talked about her first entry into the world of chimps, her many discoveries, and her hopes for a better future. It was, I must say, a lovely interview. Take a listen. Thank you very much for coming and to join us today. Thanks for inviting me. Let's talk a little bit about your background. Gilbert Grovener, chairman of the National Geographic Society,

once wrote about you in one of your books. She was hardly the image one would project to become an old African hand. Her bush experiences were honed in the genteel English countryside. Well, it wasn't exactly genteel. I wouldn't have described it like that. But, you know, animals were my passion from even before I could speak, apparently. So I was watching earthworms in my bed when I was one and a half. And I hid for five hours in a hen house when we had the opportunity to go into the country because we lived in the town.

Because I was collecting the eggs. And, you know, there was. the egg, where was the whole big enough for the egg to come out? Nobody told me, so I hid. He wanted to watch it. And I watched it. And it was my first, you know, wonderful experiment. And then when I was about 10, 11, I found the books about Tarzan of the Apes, fell in love with Tarzan. He's got that wife, Jane, you know, so I was terribly jealous of her. And that was when my dream started. When I grew up, I would go to Africa, live with animals, and write books about them. That's how it all began. And how did you fulfill that tree? Well, I got the opportunity when a school

friend invited me to go and stay on their farm in Kenya. And I was working at the time with documentary film studio in London, which is a great job, didn't pay very much. So I quit that, went home and worked as a waitress and served people there, breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner until I'd saved up enough money to buy my return fare by boat because it was cheapest in those days. So, you know, I was 23 and I sort of said bye-bye to family, friends and country, and off I went. But we had arranged a job for me in Nairobi, a boring job, a secretarial job, but at least I would be independent. And that was when I heard about the late Louis Leakey. And somebody said, Jane, if you're interested in animals, you must meet Lewis. So I picked up the telephone, cheeky me,

and made an appointment to go and see Louis Leakey. He was then curator of the Natural History Museum in Nairobi. And were you around then when we made that famous discovery? No, I was the year before. It was the year before. Oh, just missed it. Which was so lucky. It was lucky.

Yes, because it was absolutely unknown. We just spent all day chipping away in the rock. And then Gillian and I were allowed out on the plains. And all the animals were there, the antelopes, the zebra, the giraffes. And one evening there was a rhino, which was a little bit scary. And one evening, a young male lion, two years old, totally curious. Never seen anything like me and Gillian before. And he followed us for at least, well, a couple of football pitches.

It was like being at home. And so then how did you find your way toward working with the chimps? Well, it was during that Oldaville time that Lewis realized that I was the sort of person. He said he'd been looking for for about 10 years. So he made this suggestion to me, took him a year to get the money. I mean, who was going to give money to a young girl, a female, who didn't have a degree of any sort, straight out from England? I mean, what a ridiculous idea. So I was in England waiting, learning what I could about chimpanzees while he searched for money and eventually found a wealthy American businessman.

Okay, Lewis, he was, he's enough money for six months. we'll see how she does. And you did pretty well. Well, it was a very, very worrying time because I got to Gombe. Again, I felt I was at home. But the chimpanzees ran away as soon as they saw me. You know, they're very conservative. They'd not seen a white ape before.

And I knew if that six months' money ran out before I'd seen something really exciting, you know, I would have let Lewis down. Well, we told you so. This is ridiculous. But fortunately, just, before that time came, I saw the first observations of using and making tools, and that was the saving observation, the breakthrough. Of course, at that time, you know, we were defined as man the toolmaker. That was supposed to differentiate us more than anything else from the rest of the

animal kingdom. David Grabeard, bless his heart. I saw him crouched over a termite mound. couldn't really see properly. They were still not very relaxed in my presence. I was hiding, but I knew he was using a piece of grass. And a few days later, he and one of the other chimps, I could see them much better, the whole thing, putting in the grass, picking the termites off, picking a leafy twig and stripping off the leaves,

which is the beginning of toolmaking. So that was it. Exciting? It was, I couldn't actually believe it. I had to see it about four times before I, let Louis Leakey know and then I sent a telegram and he sent back his famous comment ha ha now he must redefine man redefine tool or accept chimpanzees as humans well you know I know you do wonderful chimp calls I'm going to try to get my engineer ready for this because

Jane helped me it's pretty loud so tell us what call you're going to be giving well I'm going to do the greeting and it's the kind of sound you'd hear if you went to Gombe and you climbed up onto the ridge in the morning and you listened and if you're lucky you're you hear the chimpanzee who's calling out saying, here I am, it's a wonderful day, where are you? And, oh, who, who, who, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Wow. Each one has his or her own individual voice.

You know exactly who's calling. So, like, we can tell on the phone who the chimp is, you can also tell. Yes, correct. You were, I want to pick up on the, you're having to get a PhD, you went back, and they were just aghast at you. Yeah, they were. Whippersnapper. It's upstart.

Yeah, it was even accused of teaching the chimps how to fish for termites, which, I mean, that would have been such a brilliant coup. Besides your initial discovery, what has been the most surprising to you? The most surprising and shocking, really, was when in 1970, that's after 10 years of research, we realized that chimpanzees have a dark side, just like we. I thought they were so like us, but rather nicer, and then to find that they're capable of brutality, that they may even have a series of events, not unlike primitive warfare,

that they can attack members of another social group so severely that those individuals die as a result of their wounds and that infants can be killed. And that was very, very shocking. And why it took 10 years, about 10 years to discover that? Well, because the boundary patrols are right out at the far, end of their range. And I suppose we just weren't following them far enough. But also the warlike, we called it the four-year war, that was a rather specific circumstance. And it was when

our main study community divided. And when those two groups had sort of completely separated, then the males of the larger group began to systematically annihilate the split-off individuals. It was almost like a civil war. And it was very, very shocking. Let's go to Sharif in Philadelphia. Hi. How you doing? I wanted to know if you believe there are any undiscovered large ape species, and if you believe that the bonobo chimpanzee is a subspecies of the chimp or a separate species.

Okay, well, I'll do the second one first because that's easy. It's definitely another species. I mean, it's known. It's described as another species. It's a bonobo, not a pygmy chimpanzee. Different in many, many ways. What a wild species, that is. I mean, just incredible.

Yeah. Rich species. The things that they do that we never thought. That's right. The chimps do. Yes. Chimpanzees, bonobos and humans genetically are equidistant. As for the other, you're talking about a Yeti or Bigfoot or Susqueh.

Is that what he's talking about? Yes, yes, he is. Is that the message I'm missing here? I think that's the message you're missing. Is that right, Cherie? Pretty much. Well, now you'll be amazed when I tell you that I'm sure that they exist. You are?

Yeah. I've talked to so many Native Americans who, who've all described the same sounds, two who've seen them. I've probably got about 30 books that have come from different parts of the world from all over the place. And there was a little tiny snippet in the newspaper just last week, which says that British scientists have found what they believed to be a Yeti hare, and that the scientists in the Natural History Museum in London couldn't identify it as any known animal. Now, that was just a wee bit in the newspaper,

and obviously we have to hear a little bit more about that. this age of DNA, if you find a hair, there might be some cells on it. Well, there will be, and I'm sure that's what they've examined. My little tiny snippet said that don't match up with DNA cells from known animals, so apes. Did you always have this belief that they existed? Well, I'm a romantic, so I always wanted them to exist. All right, Cherie? Thank you.

Thanks for calling. How do you go looking for them? I mean, people have been looking, or has this just been, since we don't really believe they could exist, we really haven't really made a serious search. Well, there are people looking. There's very ardent groups in Russia, and they have published a whole lot of stuff about what they've seen. Of course, the big criticism of all this is where is the body? You know, why isn't there a body? And I can't answer that.

And maybe they don't exist. But I want them too, and so I... What needs to be researched out there? I mean, what is missing from the picture? Well, one of the most fascinating areas for research is cultural differences between different populations across Africa or even different neighboring communities. And of course, it's still controversial as to whether chimpanzees can have culture. But I define it very simply as behavior that's passed from one generation to the next through observation, imitation, and practice. And tool-using behaviors differ quite marketly.

across the species range in Africa. Now, we've just begun to skim the surface of these differences. But even as you and I are speaking, chimpanzees, along with their cultures, are being wiped out right across Africa. So from about 2 million 100 years ago to the very maximum 200,000 today, and that's more likely to be 150,000, mostly in tiny isolated fragments where there's no possibility for long-term survival because the gene pools aren't big enough. And they're dying? Why? They're dying because of habitat destruction as human populations grow. They're caught in wire snares set for other animals, but they catch the chimps and gorillas for that matter.

and they either die of gangrene or lose a hand or foot and can't compete very well reproductively. But the worst threat for chimps today is the commercial bushmeat trade, and that is the hunting of animals for sale in the big towns, not subsistence hunting, which has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years. But this has happened because the logging companies have made roads in terms. to the heart of the last great forests of the Congo basin. Hunters go along the trail. They now have transport. They shoot everything. They load it on the truck. They take it to the towns.

Where the elite will pay more for it than chicken or goat. No kidding. That's Ira Flato in conversation with conservationist Jane Goodall. I'm John Dankoski, and this is Science Friday from WNYC studios. In case you're just joining us, we're listening to a 2002 interview with Ira Flato and conservationist Jane Goodall in recognition of her recently winning the prestigious Templeton Prize. Do you see yourself as an effective spokesperson for the environment now?

There are so few people. One of the remarks that so often said to me after a lecture, people come up and they say, you have re-inspired me to do my bit. You have made me feel that my own life is more worthwhile. But do you think that people

who might be tougher to reach with that message? might be more inclined to invite a Jane Goodall to speak or listen to you as someone who was a quote-unquote a political environmentalist. Well, I do know that when talking to people who perhaps think very differently, the only chance you have of getting them to think in a different way is to touch the heart. And if you're strident, if you start accusing people, if you point fingers, then you immediately see the eyes glaze over and you know that you're not getting across.

And, you know, I have to go around and think that so much of what goes on that, in my view anyway, is a mistake. It's due not to any kind of criminal intent, but simply because people honestly haven't understood. So I feel that that's my job. My job is to help people understand and to think about the future. I mean, just imagine what this world

would be like if we went back to the old tradition of the Native Americans who said every major decision has to be made with the question, how will this affect our people seven generations on? Even if we could just say two generations on, even one generation on, it would be helpful. Do you miss, though, the forest? I try and keep the forest in me. That's what I have to do to remain sane. But when I do go back to Gombie, you know, it's to be out in the forest, even without a chimpanzee, to be in that timeless

world where it's soft and where life is entwined and you actually see the pattern of nature. And I always feel this great spiritual power, which I believe is around. It must rejuvenate you. It does. Absolutely. What do you want to be remembered

for it? I think I'd like to be remembered as someone who really helped people to have a little humility and realize that we are part of the animal kingdom, not separated from it. The various results from chimpanzee research has done a lot to soften scientific attitude. And then about my work for the environment, let's wait till I'm dead and see what sort of impact I've had, then I can tell you. And so you're going to continue to travel? I have to, well, as long as I can. Because? Because it's making.

a difference because I can see the result of a visit like to mainland China. The minister of the environment said, Dr. Kudol, I would like your programs in our schools. And it's changing the attitude of children to animals. So in your quiet way, I mean, you're sort of in a background until an IMAX movie or something comes out, but you're still working very hard. I'm working harder now than I ever work. This is much harder work than crawling through the forest after the chim. That was just bliss, exhausting physically, bliss. This is, you know, every day, and you take it, you live it day by day.

That's the only way to get through it. Well, good luck to you. Thank you. That was Ira Flato, interviewing chimp conservationist Jane Goodall back in 2002. Dr. Goodall is this year's winner of the Templeton Prize, which was announced late last week. If you want to spend more time with Jane Goodall, you can dip into our new archive series, Science Friday Rewind, brought to you by digital producer Lauren Young. You can see photos of Dr. Goodall in the 1960s observing chimps in the field.

You can listen to more highlights of past interviews, including my talk with her just at the start of the pandemic last year. And you can sign up for more archival stories at sciencefriiday.com slash chimps. After the break, can we take the ideas from the flat-packed furniture at IKEA to your pasta pot? Yeah, we'll noodle over that. Coming up after this. This is Science Friday. I'm John Dankoski. When I walk down the pasta aisle at the grocery store,

I am amazed by all the different shapes and sizes. They're those big shells, the twisty rotini, the tubes of ziti, the farfali butterflies, or maybe they're bow ties. And of course, the flat linguine noodles. Each one for a different recipe, or maybe a different sauce pairing. But what if your pasta could change shape? Here's Sifrice Charles Burgquist. Hi, Charles.

Hey, Jen. So I love big noodles, the ones that are kind of shaped like calamari rings. But what's this about them changing shape? Well, researchers investigating how to get a flat sheet of pasta to fold itself up into tiny boxes or rose flower shapes or spirals when you cook it. Oh, that sounds cool. So more than just going from dried pasta to an al dente noodle. Yeah, this is pasta that folds. that folds itself up like origami.

And I asked Dr. Lening Yao of Carnegie Mellon's Morphing Matter Lab about just why they were working on this problem. So we were very inspired by the idea of flat pack from the furniture industry. And we read news articles about how furniture saving millions, even not billions of dollars every year globally by just flat pack. But also, that's just good for the environment. When we can cut consumptions, at least we can cut a lot of shipping space and the packaging costs and space. Similarly, we also learned food packaging is one of the big waste sources.

And we thought, hey, why don't we borrow this pack idea and combine that with the morphing technique we've been developing and try to think about morphing food? Then if you talk about food, pasta is one of the big players because it's a commodity. type of food. And we are also interested in starting with pasta because there are very rich shapes in pasta. Macaroni, for example, they pair with different sauce with different surface textures and flavor than spaghetti. But macaron to spaghetti has more than 60% of the packaging space that is used for packing air. And we thought it would be great if we pack all the pasta flat to save more than half of the packaging stays indeed, but then you can still get to eat in the shape you want.

It's also just kind of magical. Magic empowered by science. That's the part as researchers we love to enable. Can you make any shapey want or are there shapes that are just out of the realm of your capabilities? So with the grooving mechanism, you can make quite a lot of different shapes. So in the paper we showed you can make, for example, quite sophisticated rose flowers. We made shapes like a box,

the common helix, matrioni pasta shape like a cylinder. We also showed, I believe, some saddle shape, a little bit like potato chips. And geometrically, we will define most of the pasta shape as a developable geometry. So as the next step,

we are very interesting understanding how the engineer non-developable geometry. Put it into simple words, non-developable shapes are shapes like a dough or like a cone. So if you want to make a seamless bowl or a dough, that's actually a quite of a challenge. So it might be hard to make the all-important little tiny dinosaur-shaped pasta or little spaceships or something like that. Space shape, it depends. So another way to understand what we can do right now is if you can imagine a shape being possible with origami with a piece of paper, you can likely do it.

Okay, so I need to be able to take a flat thing and somehow segment it just with corners and ridges, but I can't pull it. I can't. Can I twist it? You can introduce hinges or folding hinges at locations you want, and then they pretty much self more like how our Gandhi will fold. But in our case, we do it by themselves, like autonomous folding. And you can do twist indeed. We actually showed like potato chips, if you think about it, it's a saddle shape. That is a one twist, but we can also do helical structures. Is it hard to work out the arrangement of grooves and ridges that you would need to build a specific shape? Or is it just as simple as I want it to fold this way? I put a groove here and it does it.

One major intellectual contribution we introduced in the paper is, the design guidelines that tell people the rational design and behind the shapes we showed. We introduced basically two primitives, if you will. One is parallel groups. Basically, if you introduce parallel groups, you basically can introduce a curve, a folded hinge. And another primitive is radio-symmetrical groups.

And those will form a cone. And then if you combine multiple cones together in different region, in different regions, in different orientation, you can suddenly make shapes like the roseflower we showed. And this is only step one. Again, it's still more of a geometrical primitive way of thinking about things.

Right now, our lab is developing a machine learning powered design tool. And we wanted the tool useful for people who are not interested in understanding deep geometry principles, like maybe a chef. We can basically input. or call out the shape they want. So, for example, oh, I want a rose flower.

And we will be able to convert the 3D shape they want into a flat sheet and also would suggest groove patterns. In those cases, you just basically need to make a stamp and then directly, yeah, introduce grooves on your pasta. So you're doing origami with the pasta noodles. But walk me through what's actually happening on a physical level. What's causing the pasta to fold? In the case of pasta, we're actually looking into differential swelling behavior.

Basically, the region that is exposed to water will swell more. For the places that are covered by, you know, like a goof wall, let's say. The water has to take time to penetrate into the center part of the pasta sheet. So the slight different timing in terms of the water reaching the same horizontal. So line of the pasta sheet, really cause the transformation. Does it fold towards the groove, away from the groove? How should I be thinking about this? So when you think about pasta, the pasta will basically fold towards the groove side.

So the convex region is really blocking the water from penetrating. So that basically costs the side with the goof. Averagely, we will swell more slowly than the side that does not have goof. So, you know, the site swell more slowly will end up a smaller surface area. And then if you look at the C-star as a complete structure, it will suddenly become a bi-layer and bend towards the side with the groove. So do these rules apply to any material or is there something special about the flour and the pasta that makes this possible? The beauty of this phenomenon is this is a universal morphing mechanism. It will work for most of, if not all, material that can readily swell in water or in a solvent.

So in the case of edible material, we try the different kinds of flowers, but you can also imagine food gels, for example, gelatin, agar, seaweed gels, all these gels can possibly morph in a very similar way. And beyond food, we also showed in our paper, you can make, for example, silicone rubber fold and unfold in a very similar way. But in that case, you will have to use the organic solvent instead of water because the silicon rubber will swell more readily in organic solvent than in pure water. Are there things out in nature that are doing this already that we haven't noticed?

Scientists definitely noticed. And there are very interesting phenomena in nature in terms of morphine triggered by diffusion. So for example, pine cones, nature made them to be responsive to, you know, to the moisture level in the environment. And we are very inspired by this similar kind of nature by layers. But in their case, you know, the swelling is due to the microscopic structures at the cell level and the arrangements of the cell and fiber contents is less about surface groove per se. Sweating mechanism is very similar, but the structure design is slightly different in our case.

Did your lab have a lot of pasta parties while you were working on this research? We had a few. Once we actually went on a hiking trick, we made a bunch of pasta flat packed in little paper box. And I also had once a pasta party at my home. We actually ended up cooking three or four different kinds of morphing pasta. I invited my researchers in the lab to try it out. You know, they were chatting, but also giving us some feedback. And it tastes like regular pasta. Can I tell if I'm eating it that, oh, this is weird origami pasta? For most of the feedback we got, they didn't really feel this is very different.

But like I said, the original recipe is really just made of the same samolina flour and water. They are just different in shapes. of course you will have different texture fitting. That's the purpose of why we want to make different shapes. But yeah, in terms of we're very proud, the reason we were looking into like a groove and surface texture-based morphing mechanism is that we do not want to modify the conventional pasta recipe because food is such an industry that's tied to culture, tradition, right?

We want as much as possible kind of preserve the raw material, recipe, which is honestly one of the biggest challenge, because as a material engineer, we do morphing matter. There are some common techniques, usually by tuning the composition and the chemical structures. But for food, we're kind of constrained in that sense. Dr. Linning Yao is director of the Morphing Matter Lab in Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science in Pittsburgh. Thank you so much for taking time to talk about this with me. Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thank you. And you can see some videos of this magic morphing pasta on our website at sciencefriday.com slash pasta.

For Science Friday, I'm Charles Berkwist. Hear that? That's the sound of brood ten. After 17 years underground, billions, maybe even trillions of cicadas are emerging in one big group, only to mate, die, and to leave behind billions of tiny exoskeletons over the course of about six weeks. To some, this might sound like. a blockbuster horror movie or a story from the Bible, but for others, like my next guest, it's a chance for a sustainable snack. Bunlai is the chef at Mia sushi in Connecticut, and he's here

to fill us in on how to hunt and prepare a cicada and how they fit in as a sustainable food source. Bunai, welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me, John. So you had to travel from Connecticut to Washington, D.C., to be able to get some of these cicadas. Tell us a little bit more about that. I wouldn't have to travel here if Broodex still came up in Connecticut like they used to. So cicadas are, like many animals, threatened by the destruction of the habitat. It just so happens that this time there's just so many coming out that it really makes sense to put it on our menus now. I mentioned that you go hunting for cicadas, but, I mean, is it really hunting for cicadas?

Is it hard to find them? I like to think of myself as a hunter. but it's really a romantic vision of myself. The reality is it's more like you're plucking cherries off of trees. If you're searching for cicadas to eat, are you looking for something different? I mean, are there tastier-looking cicadas than others? Actually, the younger cicadas are the tastiest, because the exoskeletons haven't formed yet, so they're the most succulent, and you don't have that hard shell to get stuck in their teeth.

Oh. So talk about preparing cicatias. is you've caught a bunch of them now, and you have to put together a dinner for people. What do you do with them? So in the Congo, many insects are, for example, like locusts, which is an agrarian pest that we should be eating, is prepared by boiling them in salt water,

then salting them in oil or lard. I think the easiest way and the tastiest way of preparing cicadas is to do the same, which is to boil them in salt water like you would lobster, and then salting them in some sort of fat, I would say like a really tasty olive oil and then just sprinkling a little salt on there. If you want people to actually eat these things, you need to, I don't know, make them feel like this is something that they'd want to crunch down on.

So explain a little bit about the taste of a cicada. Eating a cicada is like eating a tiny little soft shell crab. Very, very interesting as in there's all sorts of different layers of flavor. I always taste a little bit of popcorn. There's that chewy dish of popcorn. I taste all sorts of different types of nuts and even beans, reminiscent of flavors that we're already very used to and familiar with. And I think that also has to do with the fact that cicadas have been coming up out of the ground for millions of generations. It's something that we've been eating for a long, long time.

We just don't remember it in our conscious mind. I'm John Dankowski, and this is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. I'm glad you mentioned lobsters because you've talked to, about this before. Americans are just used to eating these big spiny creatures that come from the sea, but we find a cicada potentially repulsive. What do you think the disconnect is there for American eaters? Our food preferences are a social construct. So it wasn't too long ago when people in the United States didn't eat lobster. And it wasn't this gourmet, expensive food. I also think my mom was telling me how it wasn't long ago when a lot of people didn't

like to eat sushi or didn't even know much about eating sushi and thought it was kind of gross to eat raw fish. And now it's mainstream. So I think when it comes down to eating cicadas, it's really not that much of the leap. Their preparation is very much the same. And they taste very similar as crastations too. At your restaurant, for years and years, you've been doing this, not just with cicadas, but with other bugs, to talk a little bit more about just the idea of sustainably eating insects in a way that the American diet hasn't necessarily always, I don't know, attached itself to. Our food system is very, very destructive of the environment.

A fifth of the greenhouse gases that happen today come from a food system, primarily from the production of red meat. Cicadas are a gateway to the idea of eating insects, and eating insects is really the opposite of eating. beef and its impact because you barely need to use any water, barely creates any sort of greenhouse gases, barely need any land at all too. So it's the way we've always been eating, but it's also the future of food. From before I was asking you about how you harvest these cicadas, how you find them, you're not digging around on the ground for them, are you? Yeah, so you don't want to dig

into the ground. That's what I was going to do when I first came. And then I realized, wait a second, that's a really great way of destroying habitat. So you wait for them. wait for nature to have them come back out of the ground again. And then you just pick them off the trees and wherever else you find them. It's really, really important for us to go and harvest the potatoes from where the soil is clean. So you can't go where their neighborhoods, where their old houses, because all the ground is going to be letted. You really need to go into old parks in the woods where humans haven't been. We've run out of time.

I'd like to thank my guest. Bun Lai is the chef at Mia Sushi in New Haven and Woodbridge, Connecticut. If you'd like to see photos of these cicadas and how Bun prep them, you can visit our website at Science Friday.com slash cicadas. Bun, thanks so much. Thank you so much, Sean. If you missed any part of this program or you'd like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts. Or you can ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Every day is now Science Friday.

Say hi to us on social media too. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or you can email us. The address is SciFry at Science Friday.com. I'm John Dengkowski. Thanks for joining us.