Goats

They have four legs, fuzzy faces and udders full of milk. To the uninitiated, they look like dairy goats. To GTC Biotherapeutics Inc., they're cutting-edge drug-making machines. The goats being raised on a farm in central Massachusetts are genetically engineered to make a human protein in their milk that prevents dangerous blood clots from forming. The company extracts the protein and turns it into a medicine that fights strokes, pulmonary embolisms and other life-threatening conditions.

We've heard about "The Men Who Stare at Goats" but what about the men who wrangle goats? The goats that had to bear the brunt of George Clooney's psychic assaults were provided by animal coordinator Sled Reynolds and his company, Gentle Jungle. "I only keep about four or five goats," Reynolds said. "We use them in nativity scenes. But we found a rancher near the set in New Mexico who let us use the 80 goats the film required." Just like their costars, when they weren't filming, they hung out in a trailer -- but with fewer amenities.

Got goat's milk? Northern California ice cream maker Laura Howard does and she's using it to turn out a product that's anything but plain vanilla. Howard's goat-milk frozen treats are winning shelf space in upscale grocery freezers across the country. And here's the kicker: They don't taste of goat. "Some people see goats' milk ice cream and they sort of wrinkle their nose," said Howard, who traded Hollywood for the country charms of Petaluma to start her Laloo's Goat's Milk Ice Cream Co.

Thousands of hungry goats roamed Catalina as recently as a decade ago, gobbling every green leaf and shrub in sight, the island's de facto brush clearance program. After years of angst-filled debate over the voracious nonnative goat population, the animals were killed or removed so that natural chaparral and scrub could flourish. In this record dry year, the return of thick native vegetation along with nonnative grasses provided an abundance of wildfire fuel.

For six years, it has been a tradition for Muslims in the Research Triangle: After morning services on the first day of Eid al-Adha -- the "festival of sacrifice" -- scores of families leave the tweedy environs of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill and head toward an obscure plot of land on a two-lane country road. They come to visit Eddie Rowe, a hog farmer. The children typically run around among Rowe's loose chickens. The women prepare picnic sandwiches.

Researchers at UC Davis have genetically engineered goats to produce an antibacterial milk that could eventually help protect children from diarrheal diseases, according to a report released today. The goat milk was engineered to contain lysozyme, an important antibacterial enzyme in human breast milk that is substantially lacking in the milk of dairy animals.

Jeff Bridges, looking like a Malibu prophet with his bushy beard and seasoned surfer smile, says he had a bit of a flashback while filming "The Men Who Stare at Goats," which fictionalizes the oddball odyssey of a U.S. military program that tried to train soldiers to use mental powers as a weapon (and, yes, to snuff out farm animals by glaring at them). "I found myself remembering my own experiences in the 1970s when I hung out with John Lilly, the man who invented the isolation tank and did experiments with trying to communicate with dolphins," Bridges said.

"The Men Who Stare at Goats" sounds like some ethnographic documentary about the bushmen of the Kalahari or the Bakhtiari herders of old Persia. Anyone expecting anything like that, or even a Disney family film like "Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar," is going to be surprised. Instead, first-time director Grant Heslov has come up with something wackier and more whimsical, a quirky comedic drama about one of the stranger aspects of the modern American Army, a time when certain high-ranking officers felt that the New Age techniques and beliefs of the counterculture could transform military practice as we know it. As the intertitle that begins the film succinctly puts it, "more of this is true than you would believe."

It all started with an unlikely pairing of two unknowns. Back in the '80s, a couple of struggling actors named Grant Heslov and George Clooney were in Milton Katselas' famed acting class. Clooney asked Heslov, then a student at USC, if he wanted to do a scene from Neil Simon's Depression-era play "Brighton Beach Memoirs." Heslov agreed, playing the younger nerdy Eugene to Clooney's older sibling Stanley. Their chemistry worked, and shortly after, when Clooney was invited to audition for ABC, he brought Heslov along to repeat the scene.