Short Wave - Why Scientists Are Reanimating Spider Corpses For Research

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

That spider you squished? It could have been used for science! Today, we're bringing you Halloween a little early – Short Wave style! Host Regina G. Barber talks to Anil Oza about the scientists reanimating dead spiders: How they do it and why this might one day become a cheap, green way to do delicate science. Listen to Short Wave on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave. From NPR. Hey, shortwavers. Today, just a week before Halloween, we wanted to bring you some spooky science. And to do just that, we brought back reporter extraordinaire Anil Oza. Hey, Anil. Hi, Gina. We are starting this horror story shortwave style in a lab.

I have great memories in labs. Yeah, and so does Faye Yap. She was packing up boxes with machines and no peiap. books and everything when she saw something. A creepy shadow? Not quite. We were noticing that there were dead spiders that were curled up in the corner of the corridor. Spiders?

Yes, spiders. And I'm sure you've seen dead spiders like this one in the corners of this deserted lab on their back with their legs curled in towards themselves. Yep. And that's where our story gets interesting. We were at a time really curious as to why spiders' legs curl up when they die, which we don't really see in other insects. And so, they immediately put on her side.

scientist had. We did a really quick search online, and we found that spiders do not have antagonistic muscle pairs, and instead they rely on flexor muscles to curl their legs inward toward their body and hydraulic pressure to extend their legs outward. Cool. And hydraulics, that's where Fay and her advisor, Dan Preston, could get to work. They're both engineers and do a lot of work with robotics, and they saw an opportunity. Because our lab also focuses on a lot of soft robotics, we thought that we can use the inanimate spider as a source material to create a pneumatic gripper. Okay, so a pneumatic gripper.

That sounds very cool and I need to know more. Well, what Faye is saying is that they're reanimating these dead spiders and using them as something like a claw in a claw machine game at arcades. Like that scene in Toy Story? Yes, but instead of a chain and a robotic hand, it was a surreal. ringe, pumping air into the body of the dead spider, to open up its legs and then let them close up and get a grip of whatever it was that Faye wanted to grab. Wow. Okay. So were they able to do it? Did they turn dead spiders into machine parts? Yes. Fay and her colleagues put out a paper just about a year ago, where they showed they were able to do this successfully, picking up fragile things like computer chips, wires, and other spiders successfully. Like me, people were kind of taken aback by this.

Scientists have reanimated dead spiders as robot gripping claws. That is a horrifying collection of pants crapping terror. It's an image... Videos of these dead spiders gripping onto these objects got their eight little legs across the whole internet. Spiders, robots, and zombies overlap. They got so much attention, actually, that they landed on the desk of Mark Abrams, the founder of the annual Ig Nobel Awards. Oh, yeah.

So those are the awards that go to research. that's both like really solid scientifically, but kind of out there. Yeah. Every other prize I know of is for the very best something or the very worst something. Best and worst is irrelevant. If we choose well, each of the 10 prizes every year has the effect on anybody, anywhere, that the moment they hear about it, they start laughing. And then a week later, they can't stop thinking about it and they want to tell their friends about it.

And our spider friend researchers just won this award. say it fits pretty well. So today on the show, just in time for Halloween, how and why anyone would want to reanimate dead spiders. And why, maybe, just maybe, the researchers think that this might one day be a cheap, green way to do delicate science. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, so Anil, we're talking about how Faye and her colleagues are using. these dead spiders as mechanical claws, which I don't know, to me sounds pretty unusual. But is it?

Yeah, I mean, spiders is pretty weird, but it's in line with a larger field of research into biotic materials. Bio-like life? Biotic materials were part of something that used to be alive, but now they're dead and used for something else, like robotic experiments in this case. Whereas Dan Preston, who runs the lab phase in, calls it necrobotics. But biotic materials are something we encounter, you know, day-to-day lives. So, for example, things like leather on our belts or wood, other materials

like these are all biotic in the same way that the spiders that we use for the source material for necrobotic grippers are biotic. Okay, so that makes sense. But are there other examples of anything like this? Yes and no. Dan told me this is the first time a full animal has been used in this way, but it's related to ways that we use other animals in our technology. Okay. We've seen researchers use, for example, feathers, from a bird for robotics applications. Other than that, we're not aware of people using biotic materials. Yeah, feathers sound way more chill than dead spiders.

Yeah, but before you can even do this research on dead spiders, there's a lot of prep that goes into getting them into the lab, not for any legal reasons, but because a lot of people have some level of arachnophobia. And you can see that in some of the arachnophobia-related research hiccups. One of our front office staff members who handles the shipping and receiving was not a fan of spiders. She was actually quite afraid of them. And so every time we had another set of samples come in for these necrobotic grippers, we had to let her know ahead of time, and she would notify us right away when they came in.

And we had to quick get down there and pick up the package of spiders that had come in just to make sure that they weren't sitting in the office too long. And even Dan himself is not a huge fan of the creepy crawlies. I have never liked spiders. But in this case, we were so intrigued by maybe the potential applications for the work that I said, why don't we just jump in and kind of overcame that through the work. Good for Dan. I'm glad he overcame his fear.

But how are they actually making this happen? Like, I'm assuming it's not magic. They're not necromancers. They're not bringing these spiders back to life, despite. them being called necrobots. No, not quite. But seriously, so once these spiders are dead, they obviously lose control of all their legs.

And because of the way that their muscles work, they all tense up. But Dan and Faye can move them with just a little bit of air. So for the necrobotic gripper, what we did was we directly interface a hypodermic needle into the prosoma of the spider. And from that, we can inject pressure into the inanimate spider and cause all of its legs to actually.

actuate at once. So when the spider is alive, it can actively control the valves in each leg so that it can have this walking motion. But when it dies, it loses the control over these valves. So when we actuated all the legs actuate at once. It's little spider hydraulics. When the pressurized air shoots into the hemalimp, basically a spider's equivalent of blood, sorry, this is really gross, hasn't dried up yet in the spiders. So at the hemolymph then adds pressure into these joints. Wow. Okay, so this all makes sense, but I guess I'm still stuck on like, why? Just because we can use spiders as grippers, why would we want to? Yeah, I had the same question, and they gave me a short and a long answer to that.

Spiders, in this case, served as a really good source material because nature does all the work for us. We don't have to build this pneumatically actuated gripper from scratch. We just use nature in this sense. to harvest the spider and use it for the gripper. It's really hard to make robot parts that are that small. And Dan and Faye wondered, instead of trying to emulate tiny spider legs when making robots, what if Mother Nature was already giving them what they needed? So we showed that the necrobotic gripper is able to handle different objects,

such as the slander, jumper wire, the foam material, and even another spider, which is also a delicate biological material. And from our experiments, we show that we're also able to modulate the maximum force outputted by the spider by regulating the pressure that we inject into the gripper. Okay, so it sounds like spiders are actually surprisingly good at gripping. Yeah, and since they're abundant and biodegradable, Dan says that researchers wouldn't have to worry about excess waste. Electronic waste, like from batteries, is an issue in the robotics role already.

So what's next then? Can I expect labs to be using this or making a dead. spider claw game for themselves to do science? Not yet. Most of what they are excited about was taking this new idea and fine-tuning it. In the future, we're actually excited also about individually actuating each of the legs of the spider, such that we have a platform where we can study erratic locomotion in the lab. But kind of in the spirit of the Ig Nobel, some of what Dan and Faye are really excited about

was the interest and the curiosity in their work. They heard from people far and wide about their necrobotics, including non-esionabotics, researchers. So we've heard from other researchers that they've moved into this area, which we're excited to support. But we've also heard, you know, in terms of the general public, someone reached out from Australia and said, we did this together. It was a father and son duo. And they said, you know, we did this in our backyard and it actually worked on the first try. So it's not just scientists, it seems. Wow. My mom was really excited because before I started grad school, she kind of said that you'll be working on hydraulic stuff.

And a lot of our lab mates were also really excited to be calling me Spider Girl ever since. One of the biggest takeaways for Fay from all of this was asking how the things we see in nature can lead to new science. I think it's a good thing to always observe nature and always be curious and always wonder why things work the way they do. And maybe we could also come up with other interesting ideas that could be really innovative for future technologies. So, you know, Gina, next time you're alone in your bathroom and you see a bug, don't squish it. Just to appreciate all the little intricate science happening to make it be able to get there and survive in the first place. Aw.

Well, I'm afraid my instincts will still just squish it. Even dead spiders can be useful to us. That's the whole point of this one. That's true, but squishing it is going to make it not useful. But thank you, Anil, for bringing us this story. Thank you, Gina. If you've been enjoying Shortwave, give us a follow on your. your podcast app so you get notified each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday when we publish a new episode.

You can also always reach out to us by emailing Shortwave at npr.org. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our managing producer, Rebecca Ramirez. Anil Oza Check the Facts, and Patrick Murray was our audio engineer. Beth Zonovan is our senior director, and Anya Grunman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Anil Oza. I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shorewave from NPR.