Chicken

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.​

For those who find themselves torn between cravings and ethical concerns every time they tuck into a chicken nugget, Memphis Meats has just served up chicken and duck meat cultivated in a lab from poultry cells, meaning no animals were harmed in the making of the meal.

Rare breeds of chickens could soon come from entirely different types of hens. The University of Edinburgh's Roslin Institute ​used gene editing techniques to create surrogate hens that grow up to produce eggs with all the genetic information of different breeds.

Pulling chicken breasts off the bone can be a fiddly process, and often results in flesh being wasted by getting left behind. In a factory setting, that means slower processing times, and less meat to sell. That's why the Norwegian CYCLE project is developing an industrial robot to do the job.

Battery hens live pretty grim lives – but can that be improved with the use of virtual reality? Second Livestock envisions caged hens being fitted with VR goggles and movement sensors to give them the impression that they're out in the barnyard doing ... whatever it is chickens prefer to do all day.

A plant-based protein food called Beyond Meat that promises to look, feel, taste and act like chicken meat has hit US stores.

Roboticists at Gerogia Tech develop a robot that can debone a chicken automatically.

Scientists are developing a system in which computers could identify stressful living conditions for chickens, by listening to their vocalizations.