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from the I-can't-believe-it's-not-bacon dept.
El Reg reports
Months before the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared bacon a carcinogen, American boffins may have found a solution: algae that tastes just like bacon, but without the bad bits the Doctors at WHO say could cause your untimely demise.
The eukaryote[1] in question is called Dulse (Palmaria sp.) and, as explained Oregon State University, is already in demand as a tasty addition to various recipes. Boffins at the University had been experimenting with a new strain of the plant designed to boost growth of abalone, a delicious and expensive shellfish. Results were good: abalone grew faster on a diet of modified Dulse than they did on other foodstuffs.
And then one of those things happened that is supposed to happen at Universities: folks from the business school met folks from Marine Science Center and asked if they were working on anything that might be a good project for students.
Thus did Dulse attain the status of a "specialty crop" at Oregon's Food Innovation Center. From that collaboration some of the algae, which apparently resembles "translucent red lettuce", found its way into a frying pan wielded by Chris Langdon, a professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife at OSU.
"When you fry it, which I have done, it tastes like bacon, not seaweed. And it's a pretty strong bacon flavor", Langdon says.
Those among you who, on WHO's advice, have stopped eating bacon can't start planning a hangover in anticipation of a virtuously restorative fry-up because Dulce production isn't exactly happening in bulk. It's not hard to imagine that will change after WHO's bacon-killer: OSU announced its find in July and now has a potential market it could only dream of at the time.
[1] A eukaryote is any organism whose cells contain a nucleus and other organelles enclosed within membranes.
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(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @08:27AM
Boffin has connotation of person sitting in lab cackling manically while fizzy potions pop and things explode. It makes things a little light hearted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @01:17PM
yes, an almost mad scientist. Or mad but not evilly mad. Tesla would be a boffin, but not mad. Unless you had a capitalistic plan that was researched by the Heartland Institute, then Tesla would have been marketed as mad, but he'd be too busy doing his thing to care and history would note that he was a mad, misunderstood eccentric with ideas ahead of his time.
Eccentric is such an abused word. It is rarely in the proper context and is usually assigned to malign someone who has ideas counter to the one describing the subject as an eccentric.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 04 2015, @05:26PM
Tesla built a machine to shake the Earth apart&emdash;what's your criterion for madness?
https://books.google.com/books?id=J9bXbi861O8C&pg=PA95&lpg=PA95 [google.com]
https://books.google.com/books?id=DzMR8x_rbPgC&pg=PA192&lpg=PA192 [google.com]