Posts Worth Reading

Today I’ve got GM goat medicine, biomimetic navigation, and synesthesia for you, and that’s just an appetizer. There is always too much transumanism-related news, so these linky posts are a good way for me to filter out the good stuff that speaks for itself.

Genetically modified goats get a double-shot of love today: First, the FDA approved ATryn, a blood-thinner that is made of antithrombin ‘manufactured’ in GM goats: SciAm has the details and Ron Bailey some good quotations. Second, according to the Daily Mail, which isn’t the most trustworthy, GM goats are going to make human breast milk. Even worse, the Ruskies are the ones doing it. That said, the idea of goats making human milk is, in my mind, pretty great. [Sciam, Daily Mail]

A great article on body-image in the modern age on NewScientist. Key quote:

The growing number of physical transformations that people seek suggest that we need to marry developmental theory – how we understand the passage from infancy to adulthood – with the impact of contemporary social practices. Emerging sciences over the last 30 years have extended our understanding of what conflicts in the mind can do to the body. They have underlined the fact that there is now a crisis about the body itself, that many of us are acquiring a “false”, unstable sense of our body.

This has made me question the whole notion of the body as something that unfolds organically according to its own genetic imprint from birth on, acted upon by the mind – and nutrition – only at key developmental stages. We need new theories of how we acquire a sense of body that are just as compelling as our existing theories of the mind. It may even be possible that, rather like the acquisition of language, there is only a relatively brief period in which we can acquire a stable sense of our bodies.

The rest of the article is worth a read. [New Scientist]

A human washing machine with retro-pics. Why don’t we have these?! [Pink Tentacle via Digg]

Bio-mimicry, the idea of taking the processes/mechanics of nature and replicating them artificially/synthetically, goes neural in both navigation and pure thought. One of the commonly forgotten benefits of bio-mimicry is that it makes interfacing technology with biological systems all the easier. [NewScientist and Wired:Gadget Lab]

Synesthesia, which is a situation in which the mind attaches mixed signifiers to sensations (see sounds, taste color, etc.), is apparently genetic. My sister has a mild form of it (she sees numbers in color). Cool, eh? [80Beats]

The trade paper back for Transhumanism, a comic by writer Jonathon Hickman and artist JM Ringuet, is out! [ScienceNotFiction]