(PhysOrg.com) — Researchers from the University of Wyoming have developed a way to incorporate spiders’ silk-spinning genes into goats, allowing the researchers to harvest the silk protein from the goats’ milk for a variety of applications. For instance, due to its strength and elasticity, spider silk fiber could have several medical uses, such as for making artificial ligaments and tendons, for eye sutures, and for jaw repair. The silk could also have applications in bulletproof vests and improved car airbags.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2010-05-scientists-goats-spider-silk.html#jCp
I, for one, am both entertained and concerned with the prospect of Spider-Goats. I mean, imagine entering one of your rooms and finding one of the buggers hanging on your wall or ceiling! I doubt that the usual spritz of Raid spray would be enough to deter one of them. It might, however, lead to the development of a new generation of pest controllers, Goat-Busters. — I’m claiming royalty rights on that film franchise now! The theme song’s already playing in my head…you got goats, got yer freakin’ goats?
And we have other thorny issues to sort out, too, like cross-over problems. Would Spider-Goat be a superhero or super villain? Would a special issue of Spider-Man be called for featuring a knock-down, drag-out fight? And who plays Spider-Goat in that film treatment? Even if computer-generated, voice work is required…I’m available!
Now because the spider silk is found in the goats’ milk, could you acquire spider powers yourself if you drank it, assuming of course that you could get it down?- – Would that be a baaad idea? Would you then be a Spider-Goat-Person? The line is forming to the left, folks, but remember that with great power comes great responsibility…
…remember the Spider-Pig episode of The Simpsons? We’ve all got plenty to think about now, and I think that 2018 is off to a roaring (or perhaps a bleating) start. As Dr. Seuss might have expressed it, From there to here / From here to there / Hybrid animals are everywhere!
At least I’ll better fit in now, someday, maybe…
– – Few things are cool but creepy at the same time; artificial meat is one of them! We had earlier posted about the possibility of artificial meat, a prospect which has now become reality…
– – Harvard geneticist George M. Church created waves recently when poorly-translated comments he made to a German-language magazine led to reports that he was looking for “an extremely adventurous female human” to serve as a surrogate mother for a cloned Neanderthal using developing technology. With fragments of Neanderthal DNA in fossils, Church noted that someday it might be possible to assemble them into a complete genome that could be put into a human egg to create a cloned embryo, which in turn could be put into a human surrogate mother to bring back a human relative long extinct.
– – Too often, fish are regarded as dumber than a sack of hammers. This may not be true of all of our finned friends, however. In France, researchers at the University of Toulouse have observed catfish hunting pigeons as prey in a development scientists are calling evidence of adaptive behavior. 
– – Sadly, even NASA has found it necessary to debunk the reputed end of the world hysteria that some believe is suggested by the Mayan calendar. The Near-Earth Objects Program at NASA has explained away many of the most frequently cited doomsday scenarios for 2012. 
– – A prominent veterinarian is contending that Bigfoot exists, and is part human! A five-year DNA study by DNA Diagnostics, a team of scientists in Texas chaired by Dr. Melba S. Ketchum, sequenced purported samples of Bigfoot DNA, finding that mitochondrial DNA, which is maternally inherited, is identical to human mitochondrial DNA. Nuclear DNA samples, containing genetic material from both parents, appeared to involve a “novel, unknown hominin related to Homo sapiens and other primate species.”
FOXSYLVANIA 
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