Cynthia Graber

speaker

308 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 9 Jun

Cynthia Graber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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Gastropod · What the Shell? Cracking the Lobster's Mysteries · 9 Jun 2026 podcast

But remember those nozzles and jets that allow lobsters to squirt information dense urine from their faces?

I mean, how could you forget?

This is quite a sisterhood.

And so clearly lobsters do not have a Ross and Rachel sweetheart handholding love affair.

Okay, I could definitely talk about lobster sex all day, but along with lobster eyes and noses and genitalia, there is yet another remarkable aspect of lobster anatomy.

Yes, I am on the lobster payroll.

Alomgar Karim is a scientist at the University of Houston, and after gazing at a lobster in a restaurant, he spent years trying to figure out how he can use the materials in lobster shells to recreate that hard, flexible material on demand.

Turns out Alomgar is not the only scientist impressed by lobster shells.

Audrey Moores is a chemist at McGill University in Montreal.

So when you eat the lobster, at the end of the day you leave the uh

shell behind and about a third of this shell is composed of a material called chitin, which is uh a polymer, so it's a little bit like a plastic in a way.

Chitin is great, but it's even better, at least for us, when scientists turn it into another material called chitozen.

So this lobster chitin plus some extra molecules is now flexible, easy to manipulate, and still super strong.

Awesome.

But there's a problem.

The kitesin that scientists create by treating chitin with a chemical, it turns out that it gets too soft at high temperatures, and it doesn't have just the right ratio of strength to flexibility.

But Alomgur just got a big grant from the US Department of Defense to make a new armored jacket prototype from lobster shells because he thinks he's figured out a workaround.

Each of the layers is a slightly different ratio of chitin to chitosin, some with other molecules mixed into the matrix, and when they're bonded together, they cover for each other's weaknesses and make the most of each other's strengths.

So far it's going pretty well.

He thinks he could have flexible, strong armor for the military in only a few years.

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