Goat spider!?!?!
May 14th, 2006
Scientists have developed a system to implant spider genes into goats, allowing them to produce super-strength silk instead of milk.
An urban legend? Hardly. The material is known as BioSteel, and has been developed by a Nexia Biotechnologies. It takes advantage of the strength of silk protein and the lactating abilities of the goat, along with some apparent genetic similarities between the spider’s silk glands and the goat’s mammary glands.
In 1998, Nexia implanted a single spider gene into the egg of a goat, which led to the birth of a healthy female goat named Willow (for the record, the photo of the goat on our home page is only a clever eight-legged forgery). After Willow became a mother herself, the milk she began to produce contained a special silk protein which was used to create BioSteel.
After the initial tests proved successful, the project moved forward. Today, several of these goats live on a special farm in Plattsburgh, New York.
What makes BioSteel so special is that it is extremely lightweight and flexible but is up to 20 times stronger than a comparable amount of steel. The potential uses for such a material are widespread in nature and staggering in number.
Taken from mental_floss
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