A Materials World – Hacks & Gizmos with Jud Ready

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk Sports Edition.

And for this installment, we’re gonna revisit the materials world.

Today, hacks and gizmos.

I got Gary O’Reilly.

Gary, good to always have you here.

Hey, Neil.

All right, everyone should know you by now, but a former soccer pro guy over in the UK turned announcer and then we got you over here stateside.

So I’m delighted by that.

It gives authenticity to this Sports Edition identity.

And Chuck, nice, Chuck.

Hey, what’s happening, Neil?

I do, dude, never did any sports ever.

No, but I once kicked something.

Okay, and you choked about sports, so there you go, okay.

So just consider what role innovation, which leads to inventions and how they have influenced everything we do in this world, especially sports.

And so our guest, this is the second or third time on StarTalk, Dr.

Jud Ready.

Jud, welcome back to StarTalk.

Thank you, Neil.

Great to be back.

I’m really making a play to be part of your StarTalk All-Stars here, so I don’t know what the minimum number is to get there.

There is a minimum number, that’s right.

That’s right.

Yeah, above a certain number of parents, but you have a punch card.

It’s gotta be double digits, I’m sure.

You get a free something.

What’s that Chuck you were saying?

Yeah, I was saying, it’s All Stars.

Can’t get more sports than that, you know?

Oh, All Stars, exactly, exactly.

And so, and also in our third segment, we’re gonna have Jud answer some of your cosmic queries that you sent us from the Patreoniverse.

Bring them on.

Let’s see what we got.

Just created that word, I like that.

So you’re down at Georgia Tech, and are you the founder or just simply the head of the Institute for Materials?

Actually a deputy.

I was been around since the founding of the Institute for Materials.

We’re on our second director now, Professor Eric Vogel, a good friend of mine as well.

So we’ve been doing materials as the Institute for Materials now for close to a decade, but Materials Research at Georgia Tech, it’s been going on since it was founded in 1800s when it was metallurgy.

1800, you’re not that old.

Okay, so, material science is one of the most important, yet uncelebrated branches of physics and engineering that there is.

You guys come up with stuff and it just works its way into our environment and then we’re there and we’re using it, we’re enjoying it, and somebody came up with the idea.

Somebody thought it up and they’re hardly ever celebrated or heralded.

So how come you all are just so behind the scenes on this?

You guys are the Obamacare of science.

We are totally, we are totally everywhere, everywhere.

I mean, if you look through history, you got Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, all of these are dictated by the key material that was militarily useful.

And shortly after that, it became sociologically useful for us to do things.

Now we’re less concerned, hopefully, about fighting wars with each other, that many of the materials are now rapidly progressing into today’s society, whether it’s the silicon chips and our computers that allow us to do these things, titanium and bicycles.

I mean, there’s a variety of different materials that were built originally for defense applications that are now able to be used by men, women, and children across the world.

But everything-

So would you say that because this is considered the age of information that we’re truly the silicon age?

Yeah, I would.

Definitely the semiconductor age.

It’s, you know, everything around-

No, it can’t be, we’re talking about natural materials now.

Bronze age, stone age, this age, that age.

So following Chuck here-

Bronze is not natural, bronze does not-

Oh, true, oh, oh, oh.

Doesn’t accrue naturally.

Oh, yeah, that’s copper and zinc.

Copper and zinc.

Copper and zinc, damn.

That’s-

Busted on that one, okay.

I’m gonna bust you again, I’m sorry.

It’s actually copper and tin is bronze, and copper and zinc is brass.

The Z and the S are switched, that’s how material scientists keep y’all on your toes, to not let you remember those things easily.

Damn, I did a double, okay, I should just shut up right now.

You can cut that, you can trim that.

I don’t mind looking bad.

But the brass age is still going, that’s in Norways, that’s Norways.

The brass age is still happening, yeah.

Fine jazz, definitely.

That’s one of the, that’s the next course I wanna create here at Georgia Tech, is material science and engineering of music.

Cover woodwinds and brass and all sorts of stuff.

But let’s talk about sports today, for sure.

Yeah, sports, yeah, thank you.

So right now, you couldn’t get back to your office.

Where are you reporting from now?

Yeah, so lecture just ended 10 minutes ago.

And so we’re today for material science and engineering of sports, we were doing basketball.

So we were here at Zelnak Practice Center, McCamish, our basketball pavilion is literally through this door right here.

And so we were covering basketball.

So talking about shoes and uniforms, the floor itself, we’re also going to introduce a study on rim rebound elasticity, the measure of which it’s coefficient of restitution basically for the rim, how much energy is there?

I want to dead rim so that it might bounce, doesn’t bounce out, absorbs the energy and falls in.

Yeah, it’s regulated by the NCAA needs to be between 0.35 and 0.5, which is a huge range, frankly.

And as long as your school falls in there, it’s fine.

Even the ones on either end of the court don’t have to be the same.

They only have to be within 15% of each other.

That’s tricky.

That’s tricky when you’re very close.

So, I got one for you, Jud.

What the rim you really want is a black hole.

Anything that crosses my advance horizon is a black hole.

Anything that gets close to it, I need a black hole like that big.

Can you imagine how many balls you lose a game?

Yeah, how many trick shots?

Well, that’s like baseball, they lose 20 balls a game.

So, you teach class on location at these places.

Yeah, Georgia Tech is really unique in that our athletic associations embraced innovation.

And when I was on the board of trustees, I proposed this course and they said, great, but the coaches will work with you without asking the coaches first.

And then I asked the coaches, and then they agreed.

That’s how you do that.

And they agreed.

And so we cover all of them.

On Monday, we did track and field, we’ve done baseball, we’ve done softball, we’ll do volleyball later on.

We’ll do swimming and diving, which was one of our episodes before.

It’s such a great way to learn, Jud, to see the thing that you’ve kind of seen on a screen come to life.

It’s a clandestine way of teaching material science to non-material science major.

I’ve got a lot of biomedical engineers, some management majors, other people that have never heard of a dislocation or a body-centered cubic, it’s a tragonal structure or anything like that.

And I can show them, you know, 3D printed butterheads and how we make things.

What’s a butterhead?

What’s a butterhead?

Putter.

Oh, a putterhead.

Sorry.

You know, I heard butterhead too, Chuck.

And I wasn’t just you.

Wait, before we get to the putter, this is, I’m fascinated by this origin story.

One of your students took your class, right, and came to you with the idea of a concept.

That you use the LZRD, a lizard sleeve, and that person is now CEO of their own company and you’re the chief technology officer.

So your student is now your boss.

Okay, first, what the hell is a lizard sleeve?

And secondly, I think it’s great.

You now report to your students.

The ultimate revenge.

Depending on what grade the student got.

Mike got an A and he’s graduated now, so he’s no longer my student, but yeah.

So he was a wide receiver in high school and he came up with this idea of a compression sleeve.

A wide receiver in American football.

Oh yes, sorry.

As opposed to Gary’s football.

And so you’ll see a compression sleeve like this.

Oh wow, I see all these guys all the time.

So just for the listeners, Jud has put on what looks like a compression sleeve.

But you will see that there’s a difference.

All the compression sleeves out there right now are the same all the way around.

It’s the same material.

So it tends to be slippery, which is really bad for a football player.

You don’t want slipperiness.

Better to have died a small child than fumbled the football.

Like that’s what Coach Heisman said.

Can you tell him that he’s down in Georgia right now?

Better to have died as a small child.

Coach Heisman was coach of Georgia Tech and that’s where he said that and it’s totally true.

That’s odd.

Oh my gosh.

We’d rather see you drop a baby than drop the football.

So these compressive sleeves, we’ve seen many athletes use them and they usually go over their limbs and go across a joint typically.

And so those are the same material all the way around.

What Mike said was, hey, what if we made the outside still slippery so that I could shed a defender, but the inside more sticky, higher coefficient of friction so that I could hold the ball better.

And so with what’s known as a warp knit, it’s a combination of polyester, nylon and polyurethane fibers.

Polyurethane is commonly known as spandex.

That spandex fiber comes to the top of the inside part and so it’s sticky.

It’s got a higher coefficient friction, but it is not like a coated on material.

It doesn’t launder off.

It’s not like a stick on like you have with wide receiver gloves.

And so we generated these sleeves.

Mike’s selling them right now.

Wait, wait, Jud.

I have to go to my panel on this.

Gary, Chuck, should this even be legal?

It is.

You know, after…

I didn’t ask you, Jud.

Jud, I didn’t ask you.

This is my people here.

I get the robot.

If, if, if, yeah, okay.

If no one objects, then go for it.

If there’s nothing already in the rule book that says you cannot, then you go for it.

Now if they like that, the sort of swimwear that they started to use it and everyone went, ah, ah, ah, you’re too good.

Take it off.

Why is that different?

It’s some exoskeleton skin, exoskin that changes the dynamics of your play.

And it’s not you.

You’re not a better athlete for it.

I say something.

No, Jud.

You’re not resisting.

Shush.

This guy invents something and then thinks he can take over.

My wife says I interrupt all the time.

It’s open to everybody.

Okay, no, Jud, Jud.

The technology, Neil, is open to everybody.

This isn’t exclusive to one team only.

This is being sold over the internet to people who want to use it.

So I think the advantage is that…

So why don’t we just create Glue Man as receivers and send them out there.

And if it touches any part of their physical body, it sticks like Velcro.

They used to have that.

Why don’t we just do that?

They used to have that.

It was called Stick’em.

And they stopped players from using it because they started slathering it all over.

Their entire body.

So what’s wrong with that?

So what’s wrong with that?

That’s nasty.

That’s nasty.

That’s what.

Oh, it’s the nasty rule.

Stick’em to each other.

That was the nasty rule.

So Jud, I have to ask.

In the development of this material, are you stealing a play from Mother Nature’s playbook here?

Is it biomimicry or is this a very clever use of fabric?

Yeah, there’s a couple of things.

So I didn’t talk about that.

The outside part of the sleeve does use biomimicry.

It’s a special type of fabric that promotes wicking.

So the capillary action that you see in trees, for instance, that pulls moisture away, so it pulls the moisture from my skin, brings it out to the surface where it evaporates and cools me.

So that…

Wait, wait.

I’ve never seen capillary action in a tree.

You mean we know that that’s what trees do?

The way you could see it would be to take a very small straw and put it in a glass of water and you would see it rise up the water.

So the level inside that straw would be a little bit higher.

So what you’re saying, I just wanted to clarify, when you say we see capillary action, you mean we know that that’s what they do by looking inside, not that we just, you know.

You can’t go look at a tree.

You can’t see the transfer.

But Joyce Kilmore was not seeing capillary action when the famous poem was composed about trees.

You can occasionally see it if you cut the tree and the water continues to flow out of it like freshly cut wood.

But I completely…

Okay.

So, you mean capillary action because trees have to bring water from the ground upward against gravity.

So…

So, that means it’s slick on the one side and sticky for the receiver side because receivers often have their hands, the inside of their forearms exposed to receive a ball.

Right.

And you would not want that covered with sweat, for instance, it would be slippery.

Now, getting back to this rule situation with stick them was ruled out, but wide receivers do have gloves currently allowed and we submitted this to the NCAA rules guru, czar kind of guy.

And we got our letter back on official NCAA stuff that said, hey, this is approved for competition.

So, which because it’s approved in NCAA, high schools tend to also follow that, but not necessarily in NFL.

So, we’ll approach NFL later, but really our largest market right now is actually delivery, warehouse and farm where like anybody that needs to carry like boxes or sacks of fertilizer or whatever.

This is really helpful.

So, they’re not throwing the packages.

But you don’t want to drop it.

And the guys were dropping, the guys were dropping lots of them.

You don’t want to drop the eggs.

That’s the lower end delivery services.

That’s not UPS or FedEx or anything like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

I just want to, I have to put a nuance in our vocabulary here, because I think when you use the word sticky to people, they think of something tacked entirely sticky and glue like, as opposed to something that’s simply rougher and has just simply higher friction.

But it’s not stuck to the surface in the sense we think of glue or scotch tape sticking to a surface.

Is that distinction fair enough to make?

That is.

It’s not an add on at all.

It’s just that the spandex fibers come to the top of the weave so that it’s higher coefficient of friction here, but not on the inside so that you can slide it on and off without it grabbing your arm.

Wow.

So now all you have to do is design a new pigskin that sticks to the fabric on your arm, and then it’ll be like a Velcro kind of thing.

We’ll put that in front of the rules committee and see what they say.

So I knew you guys had questions for him.

Chuck, Gary, what do you have?

So okay, Jud, we’ve talked about products like this before with glove designers at one of the major sports brands, and one of the issues they had was durability.

So if you’re bringing these spandex fibers to the surface and you’re getting a lot of contact, friction, does this damage?

Wear and tear.

Or is it durable?

Yeah, is this product durable or is it over-engineered?

Do I buy one sleeve for life or have you built in something or what is the deal?

I was going to say before you answered that, Jud, the fact that you’re actually making these yourself, I hope they’re not durable.

Fortunately, we’ve got a production partner that makes these by the hundreds and thousands of yards of fabric at a time.

So they’re commercially viable, commercially scaled.

And plus, Jud, if I remember my friction physics, where you have high friction, you’re guaranteed to have a higher rate of erosion, a higher rate of wear and tear.

That almost has to be the case, isn’t that right?

It’s a fiber.

It’s a polyurethane fiber, spandex, that comes to the surface and is more, provides a higher coefficient of friction.

It’s not an add-on material.

It’s been just a…

No, but it means all I’m saying is that if things are sort of stuck to it, it doesn’t slide.

That means whatever urgent might have had to slide is being grabbed by the material.

And that’s got to create a higher wear and tear than something that’s smooth, doesn’t it?

It stresses the material more.

It stresses, that’s all I’m trying to say.

Thank you, Chad.

Based on our testing so far, not an issue.

We’ve done these industrial laundering because some of the major delivery firms have uniforms and they go through much more aggressive laundering than what you and I have at our…

do our laundry.

And they’ve survived thousands of cycles of being laundered.

And again, because it’s not an add-on liquid or anything like that that’s cured on there, it stays.

So, what we do notice, we do notice that our logo peels off that after a thousand or so that’s been about the problem.

So we’ll work on that.

Not good marketing there, Jud.

Not good marketing.

Where can, cause you said you can get it if you’re a high school player or a college player, where can you get this?

Because guess what?

I bet you there’s a lot of high school kids who’d be like, let me get on this right now.

Hello scholarship.

Yeah, mamas and daddies would love that too for sure.

Yeah, you just go to lizardtech.com, L-Z-R-D-Tech, tech.com and order away.

Michael would love to get some.

Man, you guys are all in on that.

Listen, we got to take a quick break, but when we come back, we’re going to talk about more innovations that come out of this lab, including, what is it, a golf putter that was inspired or borrows airplane technology.

I got to see what that one’s about.

When we return on StarTalk, it’s for today.

We’ve got someone who’s becoming a friend of StarTalk, an engineer from Georgia Tech, Jud Ready.

Jud, it’s great to have you back, and it’s not your first StarTalk rodeo, and I expect to have many more of these because you work in fascinating fields, not only as they apply to sports, but to military, to all the rest of us, who are neither in the military or play sports.

So you’re a key source of knowledge and insight into things that are shaping this world.

Thank you, Neil.

Literally and figuratively.

So I got Chuck and Gary, too.

So, okay, guys, so let me say, tell me now, what’s been going on with golf?

Golf, it seems to me, as calm as that sport is, people just stand around and they swing at a stationary ball, unlike any other sport.

I guess billiards, the balls are stationary when you hit them, but how, and why should that sport be so susceptible to scientific and engineering innovation?

Yeah, golf is actually the poster child for sports materials innovation.

Going back to 15th century when it was created, they originally played with round rocks and knots of wood, and then they moved to goose organs that were stuffed with feathers.

Those were called featheries.

Those were the golf balls.

And then they moved to what are called gutties, gutta percha is a polymer.

And so just throughout history, and now we’ve got very advanced five piece balls.

When I was thinking about creating my course, I actually originally entitled it material science and engineering of golf, but then I decided to broaden it to the rest of the sports as well.

Oh, I get it.

That’s cute.

You created a golf course.

There we go.

See Chuck, I can be funny too, Chuck.

Yeah, no, not with that.

Chuck don’t play.

Chuck don’t play.

Yeah, so golf has continually just innovated.

I mean, even if you look at the clubs, they used to be called woods because they were made out of wood, irons because they used to be made out of iron, but they’re not made out of wood anymore.

They’re made out of titanium or composite of carbon fiber.

The irons aren’t iron, they’re steel.

And just golf is just…

So they’re still calling them woods and iron.

They should call them…

Pass me the titanium.

Why don’t they do that?

Because they’re just stuck in their ways, I guess.

I don’t know.

Okay.

So this was another one of your students.

What happened here?

What happened with your students?

It came to you with an idea, yeah.

One of my students, Caroline, we approached Bobby Jones Golf Course, which is of course named after a famous Georgia Tech grad, just up the road a little bit, and said, you know, there’s a lot of innovation in golf.

I’m a material scientist.

We don’t want to do me too research.

What’s some unique research out there?

And so they, we began to talk to them about additive manufacturing, ways to make putters instead of just being cast, where that’s where you take a shape and you pour molten metal into it, or forge, which is where you take a solid piece of metal and smash it and shape it into whatever it needs to be, like a putter head.

But just thanks for clarifying that.

I guess I never thought about it.

So forged is in a mold.

Cast is you shape it.

No, different.

No, no, reverse.

Cast, you pour molten metal into whatever shape you want it to be.

And then you may have some post-forming operations or something like that.

Whereas forging is you’ll take a billet of material and smash it between iron hammers.

Just never thought about it.

And your student is a bio-medical engineer.

Yep, Caroline’s graduating this semester, in fact.

Got a good job.

That’s the problem with my workforce is that they have this nasty habit of graduating all the time.

Damn.

So I’m always replacing them.

You just flunk them, you know, and they have to repeat the process.

These are your options available to you.

That’s amazing.

Those are available for graduate students.

We don’t flunk them.

We just hold on to them for five, six, seven years and that sort of thing.

For more years, yeah.

Well, my advisor told me it was getting a Ph.D.

was all about knowing more and more, about less and less.

And once I know everything about nothing, that’s when she’d give me the degree.

So, Eric.

But anyway, I don’t understand what the purpose, what, because I don’t know enough about golf.

What could you do to a putter?

Because that seems to be the exact same motion for every single golfer I’ve ever seen.

And the ball is already on the flattest surface that there is on the course, which is the green.

So what do you do to a putter to change that process?

It seems like that would be the least susceptible thing engulfed to technological innovation.

And in a way, you’re right.

That’s why there hasn’t been too much technological innovation.

But we partnered with Stuart Sink, who’s a famous tech alum, as well, and golfer.

And he did that question.

He’s the best putter.

Stuart Sink?

He’s widely recognized as the best putter out there.

But we talked to him and there’s a variety of different things.

Well, so we did additive manufacturing, so we’re able to make putters with distributed metal throughout.

The other aspect is the…

But just to be clear, it means the density is not constant across the putter or the width or through its depth.

Correct.

We can change the center of gravity and the moment of inertia.

And this is just 3D printed with steel.

We did this as practice because really we want to use two different materials, one that’s very dense like tungsten and one that’s much, much lighter, not as dense like aluminum.

And then you can really move the weight around because you want to influence the ball to roll.

You don’t want to hit the ball and make it skid.

So is that the only process, Jud, that will allow that?

3D printing is the only process that we have right now that allows this variation of density?

It would allow a gradient.

Right now what they do is they’ll take a piece of these two different materials and put them together and weld them.

And so it’s a step up.

Oh, yeah, so there’ll be abrupt change.

I get it.

You need a billow and an anvil and a really hot fire.

Exactly.

You mean a bellow.

A bellow, not a billow, correct.

I don’t know what a billow is.

So we looked at the face inserts.

This is really primitive.

This was version 1.0.

So we looked at changing the polymeric face inserts.

They have different angles.

So depending on the length of the grass, you can have half degree versus one degree and put a couple together, make two and a half or whatever degrees to allow that ball to not get ground into the surface when you putt.

The other aspect, and that has to do with what’s known as toe hang.

This is version two.

We added some weight tracks in here on the bottom.

So you’re holding right now your 3D printed part.

This was also 3D printed.

We did a little differently.

One of the main reasons that all these holes are here is that it was too heavy.

And so we did a second design that takes out just hundreds of grams of weight to get it more comfortable.

And one of the things that you see, see if I hold it like this, the face is basically flat, that’s called toe hang.

And so depending on where this part of the putter attaches, that’s called the hosel, that can adjust it.

We have the first adjustable hosel out here.

So if I move this…

Is that allowed, judges?

Yeah, well…

Gary, Chuck?

For the time being.

See, the thing is, golf is mired in a billion and eight rules for everything.

And so have they come back and be okay in this job?

So I just moved that hosel and now see how it is slanted?

See how it’s a difference?

Yes, yes.

So the connecting point here, we can move it around and based on my swing versus Chuck’s swing, Gary’s swing, you’ll want that in a different place.

And as your swing gets better, Chuck, with practice, you can move it to a different spot.

Otherwise, you have to, with all current technology, you have to just go buy another butter.

Or you can sometimes bend this, like heat it up and bend it a little bit.

So that’s a key innovation.

Oh, so it’s an all-in-one, it’s an all-in-one putter.

You’ve basically made a modular putter that changes with your game and changes with your skill level.

That’s ingenious.

We also have Brit, and now since Caroline’s graduating, I told you I’ve got to keep the workforce going.

So Brit is the next student that’s working on here.

Instead of the face inserts, we had a little challenge with the face inserts, kind of making an unpleasant clacking sound when you putted, which messes with putters’ heads.

Oh God.

I know, they’re divas.

Jesus, how much more fragile can these fricking golfers be?

You can’t even crunch a potato chip while they’re swinging.

Everybody’s already super silent, okay?

The people who are commenting are just like, okay, and he’s approaching them.

They’re four blocks away.

They’re just like, well, he’s about to make it out.

Look at what he’s doing right now, okay?

The trouble is, you know, if you were going to do something, Chuck…

That the sound of the ball hitting the putter may disturb these guys.

That is…

I hate golf so much right now.

I know, but you’d think the first thing they’d do is just turn the volume down on the clothes.

They all have the loudest clothes.

They should be worried about that first.

So the thing is, how do you alter the polymer in the face?

Because you’re kind of thinking you need a more rubberized contact surface to lessen the noise.

But if you’re putting more rubberized content in there, then you’ve got deformation when you connect with the ball.

So how do you overcome that, Jud?

Because everybody hates clacky.

Let me ask it a different way.

So how exactly did you change the face of the butter?

Because of course the deformation may…

Yeah, Chuck’s got that golf speed really good there.

That is great.

I’m going to have to practice that when we go to a break.

The polymer itself, there’s a variety of different polymeric compounds that can be explored.

We did this with a company called Carbon 3D that’s located up the street here in Atlanta.

They printed this.

We also can do metal ones as well.

And it varies between putter to putter.

Putter, the whole game of golf is what they call a game of feel.

So the way I feel putting is different than you, any of y’all feel.

And so the clacking occurred when we…

is really due to the way we attach it to the space.

So we’re going to get back to having these space inserts because they’ve got them currently in putters.

But we wanted to explore some other things.

Britt moved to this with a standard face, but because of putting, you want to promote the ball rolling immediately off the putter as opposed to sliding a little bit and then starting rolling.

You can see the grooves perhaps.

Yes, they are horizontal grooves going across the face of the putter.

But they are not periodic.

They are at different spacing between each other.

So if you’re slightly above or slightly below the center of gravity of the ball, you’ll have a different amount of these grooves grabbing it to promote rolling, whether you’re…

You can control it.

Now, isn’t there a regulation at the length of the grass on the green?

So what are you saying for tall, high grass and slow grass?

If you’re putting, you’re on the green.

And so isn’t that all very stubby grass?

It is stubby grass, but it can be differences of millimeters that can make a difference.

The grass itself is not regulated.

All sorts of stuff with this putter are regulated from the width and the depth of those grooves to the length and all sorts of other different things.

Wow, that is amazing.

So now here’s, I need to know this.

So you guys come up with all these great ideas, these, you know, kind of innovations.

Do you own them?

Sort of.

Georgia Tech Research Corporation owns the intellectual property that I create using facilities at Georgia Tech.

Georgia Tech makes no claim whatsoever on any student based intellectual property that was created.

So for instance, when Mike created the arm sleeve, the sleeve didn’t use any Georgia Tech resources.

We didn’t go to use sewing machines or anything like that.

And so Georgia Tech made no claims on that.

So that’s 100% his.

This, on the other hand, we are using Georgia Tech facilities like this.

This is the putter.

The 3D printed the tools are very expensive.

And so then we get into discussion and they actually did release this IP to Caroline as well.

So Caroline has this IP intellectual property.

Intellectual property is filed a patent.

It’s patent pending as they say.

And that’s going to belong to Caroline.

Correct.

It takes five years.

And the co-inventors, there’s a variety of co-inventors.

I’m named on it as well as some other students.

It takes five, roughly five years, half a dozen years for a patent to get fully prosecuted.

So we’re a long way from that becoming a fully patent.

But we gotta take a break.

When we come back, we’re gonna go into Cosmic Query’s portion of this Cosmic Query’s edition.

We’re back, StarTalk Cosmoguaries.

It’s a material world, materials world, excuse me.

Oh, yes, not the Madonna kind.

Mm-hmm, metals, ceramics, plastic, polymers.

More than one kind of material, yes, indeed.

And Jud, how can we find your, where do we find your creations?

Go to materials.gatech.edu, that’s the Institute for Materials.

We’ve also got a Twitter.

Jud Ready is on Facebook and LinkedIn.

There’s only four other Jud Readies around and all of them are dead, so I’m the last one around, so.

That’d be R-E-A-D-Y, Jud Ready, and that’s two Ds.

No, right?

One D.

One D.

So Gary, you got the questions this time from our Patreon members, so let’s, from the Patreoniverse, so let’s do it.

This is a long question from Jason M in Bentonville.

Biomimicry is a fascinating field of research, both in athletics and robotics.

Are we currently using it in the exploration about space?

Most of the exploration, for instance, on Mars is geared at making larger things.

Now we do have the helicopter that’s able to fly around, but I think what Jason’s asking is little tiny, like insect-type drones, which certainly the Department of Defense here in the United States is exploring for sure, very small insect-like drones.

I think the challenge that you would have doing that on an outer space application, some sort of exploration, will be a capability of that individual drone as well as powering it and its survivability in general.

Many of the larger rovers are designed to have good power systems and heaters to survive the very cold nights that will destroy a lot of electronics.

But certainly there’s an extension of larger rovers but also small things like CubeSats, like we’re doing here at Georgia Tech in the Center for Space Hardware Assembly, Fabrication and Testing that I direct when I’m not doing sports.

So here’s the one.

I’ve got to try and pronounce this quickly.

S-I-Z-I-G-Y.

Don’t be like Chuck now messing up everybody.

S-Y-Z-Y-G-Y.

So you make the sense of this.

S-Y-Z-Y-G-Y.

No one actually has that name.

Syzygy is an astronomical term and nobody’s named that.

So that’s just their handle for sure.

What’s Syzygy?

What does that mean?

Yes, I’m lost with that.

It’s the only word where it’s S-Y-Z-Y-G.

It has like five or four or five consecutive letters, which when written in script, all dip below the line.

There’s a stupid little fact about it.

A Syzygy is when any three objects that are part of an orbital system have the same azimuth in space.

So an eclipse, the sun, moon and the earth are in Syzygy.

Either a lunar eclipse or a solar eclipse.

That’s all it is.

Orion’s belt.

Syzygy, or as I would, or as I man would, it’s Syzygy.

Anyway, here’s the question.

Take an imaginative punt at how nanotechnology will impact human health and improve human abilities.

I would say, I would say-

And John, before we begin, I’ve heard people not use nano properly.

Nano means one billionth of, and they talk about a nanobot, and it’s something that you can hold in two hands.

It’s sitting on a table.

It’s sitting on a table.

That’s not a nanobot.

That’s a full-fledged bot.

If it were nano-sized, you wouldn’t be able to see it.

So, Jud, how are you guys using the prefix nano?

Yeah, nano is just 10 to the minus nine.

So it’s a thousandth of the size of a human hair.

Very, very small structures, but nano in the 90s got a really good name.

There’s a lot of funding thrown behind it, so everybody’s just slapping nano on whatever.

Micro would be a better phrasing, which is 10 to the minus six.

Six zeros instead of nine zeros.

So how will nano affect things?

Well, first of all, our entire body is already nanostructured, so it’s very natural for us to begin to interface at those link scales that Mother Nature has already figured out over many millions of years.

Now humankind is able to start engineering at those scales.

So certainly interfacing with any of the electrical aspects of our body, like our eyes, ears, tactile senses, any sort of paralysis, like your central nervous system, those are there.

We definitely use nanotechnology to engineer, say the titanium implants that you might have in your hip replacement.

We already do that now.

You’ve also got polymeric implants, ceramic materials.

All of these are engineered, maybe not necessarily the nano level to the minus nine zeros, but certainly the micro level.

Let me ask you this, does both you and Neil, so does the engineering of something like MNRA, does that considered nanotech, since you’re working on what is clearly a cellular level?

I’d say yeah.

I think, I mean, as long as you’re…

Well, cellular is much bigger than MNRA.

Well, cellular is bigger than MNRA.

That’s what I’m saying.

Working within the cellular level.

I can summarize this.

You cannot build something more intricate than the scale of the tools you’re using.

You can’t, you can’t, right?

So if you’re gonna put together a building and it’s made of bricks, sure, you can, brick layers can do that, okay?

But if the building is made of cells and all you have are forklifts, it’s, you can’t build it, okay?

So the scale of the tools has to match the scale of what it is you are assembling, if you wanna control what you’re assembling.

And often, medically, we will co-opt what are already biological tools that your body has in order to build or destroy cells that are smaller than the size of our tools.

But in the limit…

But wait a minute, let me push back.

So you’re not counting the manipulation of those readily available tools, although they serve other purposes, if you are co-opting them, you have turned them into so-called the tools of your particular trade.

Yes, but they have to…

Like, you can control enzymes, right?

That can then make something else happen.

Sure, but yes, but the enzyme is still a tool in that sense.

That is doing the work for you and the size of the enzyme is commensurate with the size of what it is it’s trying to make happen.

So Jud, are you with me on that?

Do you agree with me there?

Yes, certainly.

And the tools that we have to do to do nanotechnology did not exist when I was born.

They’re just now advancing where we can physically manipulate individual atoms if we need to or in the DNA sense that you’re able to alter aspects of it.

So I think we’re done with this topic.

I just want to make it clear that the size of the tools matter.

Oh, that makes sense.

It makes sense.

Yeah.

That makes sense, totally.

Okay, so next question.

Deki Majed asks, would we reach a point where biomechatronics would be advanced enough to help us adapt to something like zero G without long term complications that it carries?

I would say the challenges with long term space flight first depends on where you’re at.

I mean, because we spent over a year in Earth orbit, both Russians and Americans, I think Scott’s a little bit shy of one year, but certainly cumulatively.

Scott Kelly.

Scott Kelly, exactly.

He’s on a first name basis with these folks.

That’s how we roll at Georgia Tech.

We know them all.

We’ve got a great situation on space innovations that we hope you’ll come to.

We’ve had Scott Kelly as a guest on StarTalk, so there we go.

Good guy.

His brother’s a good guy as well.

So around the Earth, you’re protected from the radiation.

You’re within the magnetic field, so that’s keeping the cosmic particles from doing you harm.

Now, if we go to the moon or the Mars or Enceladus or wherever, we’re outside of that range and maybe even increase radiation, for instance, if we’re sending humans to the vicinity of Jupiter.

That, I think, is the major impediment to life.

It’s not the zero G.

I mean, that affects your bones and a little bit of your vision and other sorts of things, but I think the primary concern is going to be the cosmic ray and the other radiation impacts at a cellular level.

That’s going to be tough to overcome.

We’re going to have to build in mechanisms in the spacecraft to prevent that radiation from penetrating the human bodies, whether it’s simple things like water.

Or would you build in the mechanism to the human dermis, like what we do with sunscreen?

We slather that on top, but when you talk about nanotech, wouldn’t you be able to figure out a way to put a barrier underneath your like fourth layer of skin there?

Potentially.

The sunscreen works because of the wavelength of ultraviolet light, whereas the wavelength of these cosmic particles is vastly different that it may not be able to prevent.

But that’s a really good concept.

Robert Bourque has asked, is there any organism that biomimicry could replicate to take on climate change that would be better than the possible technology advancement we could make?

I just really like the change of heart that Robert Bourque has.

Last time I saw him, he was a strongly conservative Supreme Court nominee.

And now for him to be concerned about climate change, I mean, I’m really glad he’s picked up some science books and put down the law books.

Nice to see people change.

Everybody can change.

It shows that.

So is there an organism?

Well, the problem with climate change is that we’re changing the carbon inside the earth into gaseous carbon, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, which is creating differences in temperature, both high and cold.

You know, you don’t call it global warming anymore because it’s both high and low.

So the ability to store that carbon dioxide or do something with it would be would be great.

So you can pump it into the ocean, the bottom of the ocean, they say, but then that makes the ocean acidic and is no good for the fish.

Or you can pump it into old wells like caves and that sort of thing.

And hopefully it’ll get the salt back into the rocks or you can let trees do it.

Pump it down into basalt.

Yeah, trees convert the carbon dioxide on their own.

But the vast majority of conversion is actually from plankton in the ocean as opposed to like the rainforest.

Certainly cutting down the rainforest is no good from a perspective of sustainability and absorbing that.

But if you could engineer an algae like substance, that would be a very useful material to convert that CO2 into say oxygen, which could be useful.

Now converting too much into oxygen has its own trouble as well.

So Earth is at a really nice gold blocks point.

We’re not like Venus, which has way too much carbon in greenhouse gases and not like Mars, which has hardly any at all.

We’re at kind of a nice point.

But the problem is, and we’ve been-

Wait, wait, wait, just to be clear.

Mars is basically 100% CO2.

It’s just very little.

Yes.

Right, I apologize.

So all the gas that is there is actually greenhouse gas, but it can’t trap the heat because it’s too thin.

Too thin of an atmosphere.

But really is what you’re saying is the idea, some mitigation might happen through capture, but the real deal is we have to stop putting carbon into the atmosphere.

We got to stop with the carbon.

We got to stop with the methane.

These greenhouse gases that were pumping into the atmosphere on such a gigaton basis, we got to stop that.

But clearly Bork doesn’t want to do that.

He wants Jud to invent something that he can keep putting carbon in the air and then Jud takes it out.

That’s the whole point of the question.

Yeah, I think just the production of the CO2 needs to slow down and people say, well, volcanoes, you have a whole bunch of CO2, but you can very easily track the development of humanity and the emissions and see a direct correlation.

It’s very clear when you plot it and it’s not a matter of science.

Jud, we know that.

We’re trying to get you to fix it.

We need to work with it again.

I’m not a biologist, so I’ll need to talk to a…

I’m not a biologist, Jim.

I’m an engineer, Jim.

Damn it, Jim.

But there’s certainly mechanisms of catalysis where you convert one material, say CO2, to some other material that becomes beneficial.

For instance, as Neil was mentioning, for Mars, they’re considering converting that CO2 to rocket fuel.

You bring along some additional components, specifically the hydrogen, and you can do a reaction to take the CO2 and the hydrogen and make methane, and then you can burn that, which will help you get off the surface of Mars, or hop around the surface of Mars, as the case may be.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

So, what you’re saying is, we need you coming and going in our sports, in our space exploration, and even in our survival.

Just look around.

I just ask your readers to look around themselves right now, or listeners, to look around themselves, and there’s glasses, there’s metals, they’ll call them plastics, I don’t allow my students to do that, we call them polymers, and then all of those have been engineered.

Even wood is engineered to a degree from a shaping perspective, and some is preferentially planted.

All right, guys, I think we’re going to have to call it quits there.

But the lesson here is that we need Jud for all civilization.

For everything.

Once a week, you know, 50 bucks, I’ll charge you, nah, we’ll make it 100 bucks now.

All right, we’ll talk.

I just know that we had…

We’ll get my people to call your people, Jud, we’ll make that happen.

All right, guys, Jud, it’s been really good to have you this second or is it third time on this program.

And this will happen again, for sure.

And we’ll have you cross over into our StarTalk flagship and talk about just a broader conversation about materials and civilization.

We got this.

All right, Chuck, Gary, always good to have you.

Always a pleasure.

All right, guys, this has been StarTalk Sports Edition.

That’s the materials.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.