What happened to those GM spider goats with the silky milk? (2019) | Hacker News Reader

What happened to those GM spider goats with the silky milk? (2019)

agfundernews.com

119 pointsAnon8428 comments

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.

Blockchain + version control for news?

I 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'.

Not 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.

Yes, good candidates. Come back to "block chain" and "version control" every other year, that would be just about right.

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.

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.

There was an article (and accompanying thread) a few years ago that I sent to everyone who didn't understand why blockchain was a hype bubble[1]. It may be informative for you, too.

At this point, the word blockchain itself is very stigmatized. It doesn't help that a lot of the pro-blockchain social media world (reddit, Twitter, and Instagram) is populated by nutjobs and scammers.

Side note: I recommend you think of downvotes as "this isn't the most informative comment and should be lower" rather than "I hate you as a person". It's almost always the former rather than the latter. The latter is usually flagged instead of downvoted.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15994571

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

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

I've stopped paying attention to battery tech announcements and just wait to see what shows up on the market. There are so many 'breakthroughs'.

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

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?

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinneret 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.

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.

I wonder why they didn’t use yeast instead?

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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!

why goats?

why not silkworms?

The article actually mentions that goats may be on the outs as they are looking at producing spider silk from silkworms now

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

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?

Silkworms 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.

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