
What happened to those GM spider goats with the silky milk? (2019) - Anon84
https://agfundernews.com/what-happened-to-those-gm-spider-goats-with-the-silky-milk.html
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andrewflnr
There 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.

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downshun
Blockchain + version control for news?

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smt88
I 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.

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downshun
Thanks! I was wondering.

Didn't have a clear idea of what the implementation details would have to be
so I just named the two closest concepts that came to mind.

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andrewflnr
> so I just named the two closest concepts that came to mind.

To be quite blunt, this is a recipe for downvotable comments.

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carrolldunham
This 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

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ipsum2
The 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?

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carrolldunham
Looking 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.

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Gravityloss
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinneret](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinneret)
[https://web.archive.org/web/20161220082737/http://www.astrog...](https://web.archive.org/web/20161220082737/http://www.astrographics.com/GalleryPrintsIndex/GP2017.html)

At least I didn't know that spiders do molecular operations not only when
generating the silk substance but assembling it to strand.

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stinos
No 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.

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mrfusion
I wonder why they didn’t use yeast instead?

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aaron695
Need a random algorithm to chose stories from 10 years ago on HN and see
comments then and where it is now.

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jimmySixDOF
Like 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.

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tdburn
My 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

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mrfusion
This 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?

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soneca
Agree. My reading was _" They are still researching, but nothing happened
yet."_

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JoeAltmaier
Read a story years ago, about post-apocalypse medicine women who kept pigs.
They were pre-war and expressed drugs in their milk.

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JoeAltmaier
I like how the FUD over GM is complemented by the potential for biodegradable
fabrics (spider-silk woven in). What will the conspiracy theorist think!

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fnord77
why goats?

why not silkworms?

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Shorel
“Clearly for quantity the silkworms will always win but for material
properties, we are very close or superior in most cases,” Dr Lewis writes.

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wyattpeak
That 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?

