http://io9.com/5845004/bats-muscles-are-the-fastest-of-any-mammal-ever-discovered Can you imagine what you could do with muscles like this? We need genetic engineering now!!!
human sciences? no! humanity does not need ANYONE pissing in its gene pool. people do well enough on their own.
Run faster, jump higher (maybe), punch someone in the face 50 times a second! You could do lots of interesting things (assuming that you ALSO mess with the brain so it can keep up).
I doubt it. From a quick scan of the article it seems this is a phenomenon of smooth muscle, not skeletal muscle.
If your making a list of things to be genetically engineered, I'd like to have the eyes of birds of pray like hawks and owls a sense of smell like a bear, maybe the hearing of a bat, the longevity of a tortoise and while I'm thinking about it the ability to breath in water and a much higher IQ.
Your brain can't (currently) handle any faster muscles than we have. Climbers often experience something called "sewing machine leg" when they're tired; it's a case of our nervous system not being fast enough to control our leg muscles so you get an oscillation (a characteristic of systems that do not have fast enough feedback, or do not have properly damped feedback.) Our bones and ligaments can't handle much more in terms of pulse loading than they do now. You'd rupture blood vessels with the G forces needed to do that. And your peripheral nervous system, and skeletal system, and ligaments. And your circulatory system to handle the heavier loads, which means higher volume heart and more capable lungs. Which means a bigger chest and a faster metabolism, which means a modified digestive system to process food faster and better islets of Langerhans to better regulate the higher levels of blood sugar. It is _very_ hard to change just one thing.
Fix the body and let the brain catch up as best it can.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Sorry! On the other hand we could probably make people glow in the dark without too much trouble. We could do that I suppose. We'd probably keep a lot of orthopedic surgeons busy for a while though. But we really sorta don't need to. People _are_ getting faster all the time. Olympic records are being broken every year as people get faster and stronger.
But I bet it would be hard to make your body glow without making your eyelids or eyes glow making it crappy to sleep.
I see the cars and devices people buy - not to mention breasts - to feel good about themselves. I don't think human are mature enough to choose bodies.
