Bright Idea: Delectable corn fungus
Barry Saville has spent much of his career figuring out how to stop
fungi from infecting food crops. But for the past three years, the
Trent University professor has been deliberately infecting corn with
a fungus that produces large, whitish-grey kernels he believes have
potential as a niche product for market farmers. Here in Canada, we
have a decidedly unpretty name for it: corn smut.
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Bright Idea: Cricket Pasta Sauce
The tagline on Gryllies’ website says the company makes “delicious,
future-friendly protein alternatives. P.S. they’re made from crickets.”
Gryllies—the result of a Queen’s University initiative designed to help
students create a company—launched in Kingston, Ont., last summer with
a very big agenda: “The inspiration came from wanting to solve the
problem of food sustainability.
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Bright Idea: Biodegradable coffee pods
Every year, billions of single-serve, non-compostable coffee pods end up in landfills.
So when Toronto-based coffee roaster Club Coffee, the largest distributor of packaged
coffee sold in Canadian grocery stores, approached Amar Mohanty about reducing that
impact, the University of Guelph biomaterials expert got straight to work. “The popularity
of the pods is skyrocketing
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Bright Idea: An apple with human skin
Andrew Pelling waves a slice of apple at his audience, pointing out its unusually pink pulp.
The colour, he tells them, comes from human skin cells growing inside the apple. As the
University of Ottawa biophysicist explains in a TED Talk, he is studying how to turn fruits
and vegetables into a new and cheap source of biomaterials to repair the human body.
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Bright Idea: Furniture grown from mushrooms
A pop-up display of furniture grown from mushrooms at the University of British Columbia
is boosting interest in an eco-friendly building material. The six benches, placed outside
the university bookstore for a couple of months this spring, were designed as a proof of
concept: the work of Joe Dahmen, a professor at UBC’s School of Architecture and Landscape
Architecture
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Bright Idea: Touchscreen chamber for mice, complete with milkshake
A metal box inside which mice play with an iPad and slurp strawberry
milkshakes—is transforming the way cognitive tests are performed on
animals. The goal, say the Western University neuroscientists who
designed it, is insights into human disorders and new treatments for
diseases such as
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