Chicken

A striking study has found eggs from hens in urban backyards can contain up to 40 times more lead than eggs from commercially farmed hens. The researchers recommend those in inner-city locations test their soil before raising chickens or growing food.

In a typical poultry processing facility, much of the waste is simply dumped in a landfill or burned. Two new processes, however, make use of the feathers, blood and bones – plus one of them may ironically reduce the number of chickens slaughtered.

Making inroads in the world of lab-grown meats is Israeli startup Future Meats, which has just received the largest investment ever seen in the cultured meat industry and is rapidly reducing the production costs of its cultured chicken.

Chickens have never had a reputation as intellectual heavyweights and scientists may have found the reason why. Experimental breeding suggests the domestication of the chicken 10,00 years ago caused the bird's brain to shrink and made them less fearful.

Last year, we heard how KFC was introducing a plant-based chicken substitute on its menu. Now, the company is going a step further, by looking into bioprinted meat made from lab-grown chicken cells.

Even when they're allowed to roam, chickens are still susceptible to infestations of blood-sucking mites. It now turns out that a backpack-like device could let farmers know when those mites are biting, so treatment could begin as soon as possible.

When it comes to farm animals being raised in subpar conditions, chickens often have it particularly rough. A new system that analyzes chick vocalizations, however, could help alert farmers (or authorities) when things really need to change.

KFC plans to trial a plant-based chicken substitute from Beyond Meat, with an eye towards a potential national rollout.

​Ordinarily, when scientists want to produce proteins for use in medicine, they have to utilize techniques that are costly and complex. Recently, however, Scottish researchers have created genetically-modified hens that simply lay eggs containing significant quantities of such proteins.

Move over humans, there's a new dominant species on Earth – the chicken. According to researchers from the UK and South Africa, the most prominent marker of our age will not be our great monuments or industrial pollution, but the fossilized bones of hundreds of billions of domestic chickens.

They may give us an almost endless supply of eggs and nuggets, but industrial chicken farming comes with a tradeoff: it produces a lot of poop. To turn a con into a pro, researchers have developed a process that mixes chicken manure with an invasive weed to create a feedstock for making biofuel.

Our modern domesticated chicken is remarkably passive, can lay many eggs quickly, and has little fear of humans. But these traits were not always common, and a team of scientists recently managed to pinpoint the time when chickens went through their major evolutionary shift.​