Feb newsletter: tails, fur, and skin!

Hello, Patreon Supporter folks! It's time for our February newsletter, and we've got some exciting updates from our tail neuroprosthetic project and integument review project teams.

For the tail project, Mecknavorz wrote an update on the huge amount of work she's been doing on getting realtime and reliable sensor data from electromyography readings. She's worked through a lot of troubleshooting. Similar to Nalco and Bleddyn's report in December 2023, while we started out with systems that looked simple from the outside, it took more work than expected to deal with situations that happen when turning theory into practice. But, again similar to the Tail Project's work on hardware, the team's work on software is pulling through to the other side, and it looks warm and sunny over there. :3

For the integument project, Tiltwolf wrote a brief introduction to our brand-new Chapter 1 and Chapter 4 of the Integument Review book. The chapters, "Properties of Fur" and "Properties of Human Integument" are now on our website, representing about 50 pages of published content. These chapters cover everything from basic anatomy, to visual properties, to species comparisons, to physiology, to molecular and cellular biology, and even include some computational modeling. Nothing like this has ever existed before - distilling all of this knowledge from different fields, focusing on the things most pertinent to our needs, and including some of our own hypotheses and contributions... this is honestly thrilling to see, and is a contribution from our organization to the goal of freedom of form that I am proud of.

At the tail-end of this month's issue, I've got a small teaser for the head anatomy video. Finishing touches are ongoing and I feel comfortable now promising it for next month. ^.-.^

Thanks as always for your support and being awesome people. The financial support, the interesting and stimulating discussions, your help with us building a warm and inviting community, and the energizing affirmations that our work is appreciated and matters to people like you. Thank you.

Best,

Zennith