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Making science-fiction a reality: Bulletproof human skin made from spider silk and goat milk developed by researchers

Researchers genetically engineered goats to produce milk which is packed with the same protein as silk spiders.

Once this is milked out it can be spun out and weaved into a material that is ten times stronger than steel.

The fabric can then be blended with human skin to make what the scientists hope will be tough enough to stop even a bullet.

Dutch researcher Jalila Essaidi said the 'spidersilk' project was called '2.6g 329m/s' after the weight and the velocity of a .22 calibre long rifle bullet.

Working with the Forensic Genomics Consortium in the Netherlands, she said the goal was to replace the keratin in our skin with the spider’s silk.

The first stage involves growing a layer of real skin around a sample of the bulletproof skin, which takes about five weeks.

A video posted by the researchers on YouTube shows a bullet then being fired into the mixture of the two.

Essaidi said that the project was making science fiction a reality, even if the tests results were not yet perfect.

She said that silk has a long history of using battle in combat and that Genghis Khan once issued all his horsemen with silk vests as an arrow hitting silk does not break, meaning you can tease it out.

‘Imagine a spidersilk vest, capable of catching bullets, the modern day equivalent of Genghis Khan’s arrows,’ she said.

‘Now, let’s take this one step further, why bother with a vest: imagine replacing keratin, the protein responsible for the toughness of the human skin, with this spidersilk protein.

‘This is possible by adding the silk producing genes of a spider to the gnome of a human: creating a bulletproof human.

‘Science-fiction? Maybe, but we can get a feeling of what this transhumanistic idea would be like by letting a bulletproof matrix of spidersilk merge with an in vitro human skin.’

Bullet proof vests have been around for decades but skin that can stop them has only been the preserve of science fiction.

The most famous example is Superman, or the Man of Steel - bullets simply ricochet off of him.

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(Note: video is in Dutch)

I, for one, welcome our bulletproof Dutch Man-Spider Overlords.

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Death Star

Enraged star is destroying planet with super-powerful X-ray blast

The huge gas planet CoRoT-2b is losing five million tons of matter every second, thanks to massive X-ray bursts coming from its parent star. The worst part? CoRoT-2b might actually be the architect of its own destruction.

The planet orbits its star CoRoT-2a at a very close distance - only about ten times the distance between Earth and the Moon. Located about 880 light-years away, CoRoT-2b is a gas giant roughly three times the size of Jupiter. At least, it's that big for now - the star is pummeling it with a hundred thousand times the amount of X-ray radiation the Sun sends Earth's way.

The CoRoT-2 system is very young compared to Earth, only about 100 to 300 million years old. But even at that young age, the star should be fully formed, and it should have left behind such youthful volatility. Instead, it remains what's known as a very active star, sending off these powerful X-ray emissions created by unusually strong magnetic fields. And where are those coming from?

University of Hamburg researcher Stefan Czesla has the rather grim answer:

Yes, the planet CoRoT-2b is sowing the seeds of its own eventual destruction. That said, it might actually stand to lose a few trillion pounds or so - the researchers believe that CoRoT-2b is actually bigger than it should be, and this might be the result of its incredibly close proximity to its parent star.

So then, perhaps we're not watching a destructive force here, but rather a particularly brutal form of self-correction. The planet that originally formed was just too impossibly big, which wreaked havoc on its all too nearby star and brought down the X-ray barrage. After a few hundred million years - or perhaps even a couple billion, these things take time - of X-ray blasts, CoRoT-2b might finally be small enough to stop affecting its parent star, and that will end the X-ray emissions. It's potentially a shockingly peaceful resolution to one of the most violent relationships in all the cosmos.

Via Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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