Added 1 new A* page:Early in A*'s comic life, my mother asked me a seemingly simple but very insightful question: "What do they eat?" After all, in the colonized worlds around A*, they don't have most of the plants and animals we're used to eating here on Earth. I think I answered mom with some response about bacteria cultures engineered to simulate traditional foods, but a team of Dutch scientists—whose work has now formed the basis of a new company—has taken a different approach: growing meat in the lab:
| "The team had a prototype cooked and eaten in London two years ago that cost £215,000 to make. [...] The process starts with stem cells being extracted from cow muscle tissue. In the laboratory, these are cultured with nutrients and growth-promoting chemicals to help them develop and multiply. Three weeks later, there are more than a million stem cells, which are put into smaller dishes where they coalesce into small strips of muscle about a centimetre long and a few millimetres thick. The strips are then painstaking layered together, coloured and mixed with fat. The resulting burger was cooked and eaten at a news conference in London two years ago." |
So this is old news—I think I missed it the first time around. The new news that got it re-published by the BBC is that the team wants to sell lab grown meat in five years.
Oh yeah, and the reason / selling point for all this?
| "An independent study found that lab-grown beef uses 45% less energy than the average global representative figure for farming cattle. It also produces 96% fewer greenhouse gas emissions and requires 99% less land." |
And these days there's a potential new direction for their enterprise to explore:
| "The researchers will also investigate ways of making chops and steaks using 3-D printing technologies - but that is likely to take longer to commercialise." |
There's more than one way to make that McSynthBurger(tm)!
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