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What happened to those GM spider goats with the silky milk? (2019)
- mrfusion 7y agoThis was kind of hard to follow. I’m still not sure what the answer is. Is the milk viable? How much silk can they get? Is it useful?
- soneca 7y agoAgree. My reading was "They are still researching, but nothing happened yet."
- carrolldunham 7y agoThis fizzled because bulk producing the protein is pointless when it still needs to be spun. I remember being amazed at their bizarre hubris in expecting that just pressing the goop through a small hole would create a silk strand
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ipsum2 7y agoThe photo in the article has the caption "These reels contain "synthetic" spider silk fibers spun from the spider silk proteins produced by Saanen goats. Photo © Lewis Lab at Utah State University.". What is the difficulty with spinning?
- carrolldunham 7y agoLooking into it a bit, they have a spinning machine and my best guess is they use that to spin (in the crude, wool sense not the molecular-level spinneret sense) some of, I guess their extruded goop, into a thread. You can assume from the vague wording, obtuseness in every article and lack of mention of any mechanical properties, that this thread doesn't have anywhere near the strength of spider-spun spider silk.
- Gravityloss 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinneret https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinneret https://web.archive.org/web/20161220082737/http://www.astrographics.com/GalleryPrintsIndex/GP2017.html https://web.archive.org/web/20161220082737/http://www.astrog... At least I didn't know that spiders do molecular operations not only when generating the silk substance but assembling it to strand.
- fnord77 7y agowhy goats? why not silkworms?
- joshspankit 7y agoThe article actually mentions that goats may be on the outs as they are looking at producing spider silk from silkworms now
- Shorel 7y ago“Clearly for quantity the silkworms will always win but for material properties, we are very close or superior in most cases,” Dr Lewis writes.
- wyattpeak 7y agoThat is in fairness a pretty weak response. Being "very close" in quality to another solution which can produce in greater bulk isn't useful, unless you anticipate outdoing it in the future. In what proportion of usecases are they actually superior, I wonder?
- cfv 7y agoSilkworms are killed in the production of silk whereas simply milking the goats would let a kind of continuous process happen. It would still need to be untangled and spun which is a pain, but that would hopefully make for a better industrial process than vapour cooking tons of insects, which is also icky.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- andrewflnr 7y agoThere should be more follow-up articles like this. You could probably do a biannual roll-up for battery tech, to say nothing of more overtly political topics.
- downshun 7y agoBlockchain + version control for news?
- jjakque 7y agoI felt your comment off topic. But I do somewhat agree with sentiment of having immutable news archive as the present Internet is more 'what we can see' oppose to 'what we can know'.
- andrewflnr 7y agoNot really. The problem isn't that we don't have a record of past news, it's that we're not critically reading the records we have. IMO it's fundamentally a social issue between journalists and readers.
- jacobush 7y agoYes, good candidates. Come back to "block chain" and "version control" every other year, that would be just about right.
- smt88 7y agoI suspect your downvotes are due to HN being tired of people proposing blockchain for problems it wouldn't solve. Assuming your comment was sincere, I'll engage with your content instead of downvoting: 1. You don't need a distributed, P2P database to archive news. Archive.org already does it, for example. So do some libraries. 2. Saving things in immutable, distributed databases does not require a blockchain. BitTorrent has been mostly successful at this for decades, for example. 3. It's common for stories like this to be covered in thousands of reputable and unreputable publications. The reputable ones already have policies against changing old stories, though none seem to do routinely change stories in practice. Either way, to update a story like this, you only need one example of the coverage.
- tdburn 7y agoMy friend was actually one of the grad students working on this project. I’ve wondered what progress had been done, glad for the follow up
- aaron695 7y agoNeed a random algorithm to chose stories from 10 years ago on HN and see comments then and where it is now.
- jimmySixDOF 7y agoLike a new sub reddit : Futureology+3 just re releasing the 3 year old press releases for people to crawl over and reddit. It is a good idea.
- stinos 7y agoNo matter how much I admire it technically, from an ethical point of view things look a bit different and one might wonder if going forward with this and introducing yet another large scale industry abusing animals is really the best thing to do at this point.
- mrfusion 7y agoI wonder why they didn’t use yeast instead?
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoI like how the FUD over GM is complemented by the potential for biodegradable fabrics (spider-silk woven in). What will the conspiracy theorist think!
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoRead a story years ago, about post-apocalypse medicine women who kept pigs. They were pre-war and expressed drugs in their milk.