Charlotte's Goat(Forbes.com): In a concrete bunker on a mothballed Air Force base in Plattsburgh, New York, two Nigerian dwarf goats named Mille and Muscade joyfully munch grass and slurp water. Oddly, they are protected from intruders by security guards and razor wire. Only 20 weeks old, these sister beasts warrant tight security because their milk is highly prized by the U.S. military. Their 70,000-gene chromosomes have been manipulated to include a gene from the orb weaver, a palm-size spider that spins the world's toughest natural material. Researchers are "growing" the spider's silk inside Mille and Muscade's mammary glands. These strands of silk, just 3 microns thick, are three times as tough as DuPont's bulletproof Kevlar. A woven cable as thick as your thumb can bear the weight of a jumbo jet.

Probe touches down on asteroid: The NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft touched down on a barren space rock called Eros on Monday, marking history’s first successful landing on an asteroid. Scientists said the probe sent signals back to Earth after making contact, indicating that the car-sized probe survived the descent.

The "Genius Babies," and How They Grew: In "Seed," Slate's David Plotz will tell the story of the Nobel Prize sperm bank founded in the late '70s by California industrialist and eugenicist Robert Graham and publicized by its most prominent sperm donor, William Shockley, the Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the transistor, who became obsessed with the degradation of the human gene pool. And David will report on what became of the children born of Graham's experiment. At least Slate expects that he probably will report on it. Instead of doing all his reporting and then composing a long article, David will file dispatches, which Slate will post immediately, as he goes about his research. Readers will be able to follow the reporter as he gathers and analyzes his material, and Slate has no more idea than the readers do about where the story will lead him or how it will come out. When he is done, if it works, the entire article will be published as an eBook.