Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin "gambled" with its Moon lander proposal last year by hoping NASA would be willing to negotiate its $5.9 billion price tag, agency attorneys argued in blunt legal filings obtained by The Verge. From a report: NASA, cash-strapped with a tight budget from Congress, declined to negotiate and turned down Blue Origin's lunar lander in April and picked SpaceX's instead, sparking ongoing protests from Bezos' space company. NASA officials haven't talked much about Blue Origin's legal quarrels beyond occasional acknowledgements that the company's protesting -- first at a watchdog agency and now in federal court -- is holding up the agency's effort to land humans on the Moon by 2024.

But in hundreds of pages of legal filings The Verge obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request, agency attorneys exhaustively laid out NASA's defense of its Artemis Moon program and doubled down on its decision to pick one company, SpaceX, for the first crewed mission to the lunar surface since 1972. In NASA's main response to Blue Origin's protest, filed in late May, senior agency attorneys accused the company of employing a sort of door-in-the-face bidding tactic with its $5.9 billion proposal for Blue Moon, the lunar lander Blue Origin is building with a "National Team" that includes Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Blue Origin was "able and willing" to offer NASA a lower price for its lunar lander but chose not to because it expected NASA to ask and negotiate for a lower price first, the attorneys allege, citing a six-page declaration written by the company's senior vice president Brent Sherwood in April.

Leading UK researchers, vets and farmers have urged ministers to free livestock science of unnecessary legal curbs as the country prepares, post-Brexit, to ease gene-editing rules. Such a move would allow the creation of new breeds of animals resistant to disease, heat and drought, they argue. From a report: The government is expected to propose easing gene-editing restrictions in the near future to enable the creation of new generations of crops. However, the group -- which has written to the environment secretary, George Eustice -- worries there is less interest in using the technology to create new breeds of pigs, cows and poultry.

"It is every bit as important that we use the enormous power of gene editing to create breeds of animals that are resistant to disease, droughts and heatwaves as it is to fashion new crop varieties," said Professor Bruce Whitelaw of Edinburgh's Roslin Institute. "This is particularly important as global warming intensifies and we strive to ensure we are protected against future outbreaks of zoonotic diseases." The value of gene editing in this latter field is shown by work carried out at Roslin and Imperial College London, where scientists have identified a gene that may confer resistance to influenza. "We can now think about using gene editing to create breeds resistant to avian and swine flu, and so curb outbreaks on farms, while also reducing the risk of triggering future pandemics in humans," added Whitelaw, one of the letter's signatories.

YouTube will begin removing content questioning any approved medical vaccine, not just those for Covid-19, a departure from the video site's historically hands-off approach. From a report: The division of Alphabet's Google announced Wednesday that it will extend its policy against misinformation to cover all vaccines that health authorities consider effective. The ban will include any media that claims vaccines are dangerous or lead to chronic health outcomes such as autism, said Matt Halprin, YouTube's vice president for trust and safety. A year ago, YouTube banned certain videos critical of Covid-19 vaccines. The company said it has since pulled more than 130,000 videos for violating that rule. But many videos got around the rule by making dubious claims about vaccines without mentioning Covid-19. YouTube determined its policy was too limited. "We can imagine viewers then potentially extrapolating to Covid-19," Halprin said in an interview. "We wanted to make sure that we're covering the whole gamut."

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Identical twins are living proof of how genetics shapes our looks and traits. Now, researchers have found they carry a molecular signature on their DNA that no one else has -- one that becomes fixed in their cells early in development and stays with them into adulthood. This signature doesn't seem to influence a twin's health, but it could offer insights into how identical twinning happens. "It is a starting point" for solving "what is really an enigma," says Jenny van Dongen, a twin genetics researcher at Free University (VU), Amsterdam. The signature could also be used to test whether a person had a "vanishing twin," an identical twin that died in the womb.

An international team led by van Dongen and VU twin genetics researcher Dorret Boomsma looked for clues in what's known as the epigenome. Patterns of chemical tags called methyl groups glom onto genes, turning them on or off. (Such epigenetic changes are responsible for everything from enabling Peruvians to live at high altitudes to helping the placenta develop.) Using blood and cheek cell samples, the researchers scanned the epigenomes of more than 3000 identical twins, as well as a comparable number of fraternal twins and some twins' parents. They looked at 400,000 different places on each person's genome. About 800 locations had differences in methylation that set identical twins apart from everyone else, the team reports today in Nature Communications. "It's likely something established very early on that is propagated to subsequent cells," van Dongen says.

Some of the methylated or unmethylated spots made sense, such as tags on genes involved in cell adhesion that might influence how easily a fertilized egg splits into two embryos. But changes in other locations, such as the ends of chromosomes, don't have an obvious explanation. These regions have been associated with aging, yet identical twins' life spans are similar to other people's. An epigenetic test might also be useful to determine whether a person once had an identical twin that vanished in the uterus, perhaps because it didn't have enough room or nutrients to grow. Sometimes a twin fetus appears in an ultrasound before vanishing, but other times it may be absorbed without leaving a trace. As many as 12% of pregnancies start out as multiples (including fraternal twins), according to some estimates, but only 2% of twin pairs survive. Using a separate data set, the epigenetic signature could predict whether someone was an identical twin in 70% to 80% of cases, van Dongen says. With data from a large enough group of people, the test would get even better, she says, and it could also help "predict the exact rate" of vanishing twins. That figure would be useful not only for researchers, but also "of broad interest" to twins themselves and to families who are mourning the loss of an identical twin, Boomsma says.

According to new research published this week in American Heart Association Journal, Apple Watch can detect arrhythmias other than Atrial Fibrillation (AFib). The Apple watch irregular pulse detection algorithm was found to have a positive predictive value of 0.84 for the identification of atrial fibrillation (AFib). MyHealthyApple reports: The Apple Heart Study investigated a smartwatch-based irregular pulse notification algorithm to identify AFib. For this secondary analysis, the researchers analyzed participants who received an ambulatory ECG patch after index irregular pulse notification. Among 419,297 participants enrolled in the Apple Heart Study, 450 participant ECG patches were analyzed, with no AF on 297 ECG patches (66%). Non-AF arrhythmias (excluding supraventricular tachycardias [less than] 30 beats and pauses [less than] 3 seconds) were detected in 119 participants (40.1%) with ECG patches without AFib. 76 participants (30.5%) reported subsequent AF diagnoses. In participants with an irregular pulse notification on the Apple Watch and no AF observed on ECG patch, atrial and ventricular arrhythmias, mostly PACs and PVCs, were detected in 40% of participants.

GW Ori is a star system 1,300 light years from Earth in the constellation of Orion. It is surrounded by a huge disk of dust and gas, a common feature of young star systems that are forming planets. But fascinatingly, it is a system with not one star, but three. From a report: As if that were not intriguing enough, GW Ori's disk is split in two, almost like Saturn's rings if they had a massive gap in between. And to make it even more bizarre, the outer ring is tilted at about 38 degrees. Scientists have been trying to explain what is going on there. Some hypothesized that the gap in the disk could be the result of one or more planets forming in the system. If so, this would be the first known planet that orbits three stars at once, also known as a circumtriple planet.

Now the GW Ori system has been modeled in greater detail, and researchers say a planet -- a gassy world as massive as Jupiter -- is the best explanation for the gap in the dust cloud. Although the planet itself cannot be seen, astronomers may be witnessing it carve out its orbit in its first million years of its existence. A paper on the finding was published in September in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The scientists say it disproves an alternative explanation -- that the gravitational torque of the stars cleared the space in the disk. Their paper suggests there is not enough turbulence in the disk, known as its viscosity, for this explanation to suffice The finding also highlights how much more there is to learn about the unexpected ways in which planets can form.

Air pollution is likely to have been responsible for up to 6 million premature births and 3 million underweight babies worldwide every year, research shows. From a report: The analysis, which combines the results of multiple scientific studies, is the first to calculate the total global burden of outdoor and indoor air pollution combined. Indoor pollution, mostly from cooking stoves burning solid fuel such as coal or wood, made up almost two-thirds of the total pollution burden on pregnancies in 2019, according to the latest findings. This is especially true in developing areas, such as in some parts of south-east Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. "At an individual level, indoor air pollution exposure appears to carry a much higher burden compared to outdoor levels," said Rakesh Ghosh, an epidemiologist at University of California, San Francisco and lead researcher on the paper, published in the journal Plos Medicine.

"So, minimising household pollution exposure, to the extent possible, should be part of the message during prenatal care, especially where household pollution is prevalent." Air pollution is usually measured according to exposure to particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns: once inhaled, the minuscule size of these particles allows them to be absorbed deep into the bloodstream, potentially causing far-reaching health problems.

To slow the speed at which high temperatures and warm waters bleach the corals of the Great Barrier Reef, Australian scientists are spraying droplets of ocean water into the sky to form clouds to protect the environmental treasure. From a report: Researchers working on the so-called Cloud Brightening project said they use a turbine to spray microscopic sea particles to thicken existing clouds and reduce sunlight on the world's largest coral reef ecosystem located off Australia's northeast coast. The water droplets evaporate leaving only tiny salt crystals which float up into the atmosphere allowing water vapour to condense around them, forming clouds, said Daniel Harrison, a senior lecturer at Southern Cross University, who runs the project.

"If we do it over an extended period of time for a few weeks to a couple of months when the corals are experiencing a marine heatwave we can actually start to lower the water temperature over the Reef," said Harrison. The project had its second trial in March, the end of the Southern Hemisphere summer when the Reef off Australia's northeast is at its hottest, gathering valuable data on the atmosphere when corals are at most risk of bleaching. A combination of light and warm water causes coral bleaching. By cutting light over the reef by 6% in summer, "bleaching stress" would be cut by 50% to 60% on the undersea ecosystem, Harrison said.

Mexico's scientific community has reacted with outrage after the country's chief prosecutor requested arrest warrants for 31 scientists, researchers and academics on accusations of organised crime, money laundering and embezzlement -- charges that could land them alongside drug cartel kingpins in one of the country's most notorious lockups. From a report: A judge at the maximum security Altiplano prison -- from which Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman escaped in 2015 -- denied granting the arrest warrants on Wednesday. But the federal prosecutor immediately announced plans to pursue arrest warrants for the third time. The university professors have been accused of violating a law that prevents members of an advisory board from receiving money from a government science fund. But that law was passed in 2019, and the scientists got the $2.5m years earlier when it was apparently legal. Those involved have denied the funds were illegal or misused. The National Council on Science and Technology (Conacyt) has described the reaction to the arrest warrant applications as "a concerted wave of disinformation," which was spreading "terror" in the scientific community.

Samsung has proposed a way to build brain-like computer chips by "copying and pasting" a brain's neuron wiring map onto 3D neuromorphic chips. Engadget reports: The approach would rely on a nanoelectrode array that enters a large volumes of neurons to record both where the neurons connect and the strength of those connections. You could copy that data and 'paste' it to a 3D network of solid-state memory, whether it's off-the-shelf flash storage or cutting-edge memory like resistive RAM. Each memory unit would have a conductance that reflects the strength of each neuron connection in the map. The result would be an effective return to "reverse engineering the brain" like scientists originally wanted, Samsung said.

The move could serve as a 'shortcut' to artificial intelligence systems that behave like real brains, including the flexibility to learn new concepts and adapt to changing conditions. You might even see fully autonomous machines with true cognition, according to the researchers.
"Envisioned by the leading engineers and scholars from Samsung and Harvard University, the insight was published as a Perspective paper, titled 'Neuromorphic electronics based on copying and pasting the brain'..." Samsung said in a statement.

In short, they're proposing a method that "directly downloads the brain's neuronal connection map onto the memory chip."

schwit1 shared this report from LiveScience: The world's longest known cave system just set a new record after surveyors spent hours mapping an additional 8 miles (13 kilometers) of the passageways at Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky.

The corridors at Mammoth Cave now measure a whopping 420 miles (676 km) in length, according to the National Park Service (NPS). That's about the distance between New York City and Raleigh, North Carolina.

Mapping the cave system was a huge undertaking, carried out by volunteers at the Cave Research Foundation (CRF), a Kentucky-based nonprofit group, and other locals, including those from the Central Kentucky Karst Coalition. "Many of the cave trips are long and arduous, involving climbing, vertical exposure, squeezes, crawlways, water and mud," Karen Willmes, the eastern operations manager with CRF, said in an NPS statement... "After the trip, cartographers turn the data collected on the cave trip into a map. Other volunteers provide surface support.

Slashdot reader StellarThoughts shares an announcement from the University of California, Riverside. (Alternate URL): Plants have the ability to perceive drought. When they do, they emit a hormone that helps them hold on to water. This same hormone, ABA, sends a message to seeds that it isn't a good time to germinate, leading to lower crop yields and less food in places where it's hot — an increasingly long list as a result of climate change.

"If you block ABA, you mess with the chemical pathway that plants use to prevent seed germination," said Aditya Vaidya, UC Riverside project scientist and study author. "Our new chemical, Antabactin, does exactly this. If we apply it, we have shown that dormant seeds will sprout."

Demonstrations of Antabactin's effectiveness are described in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This work builds on the same team's creation of a chemical that mimics the effects of the ABA hormone, produced by plants in response to drought stress. That chemical, Opabactin, slows a plant's growth so it conserves water and doesn't wilt. It works by inducing plants to close tiny pores in their leaves and stems, which prevents water from escaping. Next, the team wanted to find a molecule that would have the opposite effect, opening the pores, encouraging germination and increasing plant growth. Though seed dormancy has largely been removed through breeding, it is still a problem in some crops like lettuce. Sean Cutler, a UC Riverside plant cell biology professor and study co-author, said accelerating and slowing plant growth are important tools for farmers. "Our research is all about managing both of these needs," he said...

In their paper, the team members showed that applying Antabactin to barley and tomato seeds accelerated germination. Conceivably, both Antabactin and Opabactin could work together to help crops flourish in a world becoming drier and hotter. Once Antabactin has helped seeds sprout into healthy plants, a farmer might start saving water early in the growing season by spraying Opabactin. This way, enough water is "banked" for when the plants start flowering.

"An international team of physicists have come up with a way to generate antimatter in the lab," reports Popular Mechanics, theoretically "allowing them to recreate conditions that are similar to those near a neutron star." This setup, at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) research laboratory in Germany, involves two high-intensity laser beams that can generate a jet of antimatter, as outlined in a paper published earlier this summer in the journal Communications Physics. That could make antimatter-based research far more accessible for scientists around the world...

it's tremendously difficult to recreate a neutron star's extreme conditions in terms of the science and logistics — imagine if a sugar cube weighed as much as Mount Everest in your laboratory! Two, scientists want to make antimatter for further analysis in the lab... So how did the researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf figure out how to generate antimatter? They're using opposing lasers in a setup they're referring to as a laser pincer... There's a tiny piece of plastic that both lasers shoot toward. As the lasers destroy the plastic, they send clouds of electrons toward each other... By smashing particles together between two lasers, scientists can begin to approach the intensely concentrated gravity and matter of a neutron star...

In this case, scientists are still speculating that the laser pincers will work, with support from a computer simulation that has helped them test and confirm their theory. Now, the next step is to begin building the rig that will really fire the lasers. "[C]olleagues are developing a platform that can be used to experimentally test whether the magnetic fields actually form as our simulations predict," HZDR physicist Toma Toncian says.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Third Position for submitting the article!

On Monday RockDoctor (Slashdot reader #15,477) wrote: Regular readers may remember recurring concerns over the instability of the island of La Palma, in the Canaries archipelago [population: 85,000]. Estimates of the threat ranged from 100 megadeaths (from tsunami impacts on the coasts of about a dozen countries bordering the Atlantic — including the eastern seaboard of America) down to a 10- to 30- metre tsunami with a few thousand deaths in the Canaries and other Atlantic islands (Madeira, Azores).

To bring relaxation and good cheer, today we have the news that the volcano at the centre of these concerns is erupting for the first time in 50 years. While a hundred or so houses have so far been destroyed and around 5000 people evacuated from the path of the lava flow, some people are more sanguine — Spain's Tourism Minister considers the eruption a "great attraction", and indeed recent eruptions in Hawaii did see a significant amount of "Volcano tourism". To be honest, I'm rather tempted myself — Etna studiously did not erupt during my last holiday there. Or should I wait for Vesuvius to go off again?
Here's an update. "Seven days after a volcano on La Palma erupted, lava flow and ash continue to spread shutting down the local airport and leaving hundreds without a home," according to one newspaper report (with several photos of the aftermath). "As of Friday, almost 6,000 people have evacuated.

"The government is working to locate emergency housing for the affected families as researchers are unsure when the ash and lava flow will stop."

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reports, "scientists said another volcanic vent opened up, exposing islanders to possible new dangers." The intensity of the eruption that began Sept. 19 has increased in recent days, prompting the evacuation of three additional villages on the island, part of Spain's Canary Islands archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean off northwest Africa...

Emergency crews pulled back from the volcano Friday as explosions sent molten rock and ash over a wide area...

AltMachine shares a report from Phys.Org: Chinese scientists recently reported a de novo route for artificial starch synthesis from carbon dioxide (CO2) for the first time. Relevant results were published in Science on Sept. 24. The new route makes it possible to produce starch, a major component of grains, by industrial manufacturing instead of traditional agricultural planting and opens up a new technical route for synthesizing complex molecules from CO2. The artificial route can produce starch from CO2 with an efficiency 8.5-fold higher than starch biosynthesis in maize, suggesting a big step towards going beyond nature. It provides a new scientific basis for creating biological systems with unprecedented functions. "If the overall cost of the process can be reduced to a level economically comparable with agricultural planting in the future, it is expected to save more than 90% of cultivated land and freshwater resources," said MA Yanhe, corresponding author of the study. In addition, it would also help to avoid the negative environmental impact of using pesticides and fertilizers, improve human food security, facilitate a carbon-neutral bioeconomy, and eventually promote the formation of a sustainable bio-based society.

schwit1 shares a report from TMZ: The 90-year-old actor is slated to be part of the second crew to take the space flight in the New Shepard capsule. That would make him the oldest person ever to be launched into space. We're told Shatner will be on board in October for the 15-minute civilian flight -- similar to the last launch. What we don't know -- BUT WHAT WOULD BE AWESOME -- is if he wears his Capt. Kirk getup. Our sources say the mission will be filmed for a documentary. We're told Shatner's people were talking to Discovery about the special, but that didn't materialize ... but our sources say Shatner and Co. have taken the project elsewhere and are in negotiations.

Engineers at the University of Cincinnati are developing new ways to convert greenhouse gases to fuel to address climate change and get astronauts home from Mars. UC: UC College of Engineering and Applied Science assistant professor Jingjie Wu and his students used a carbon catalyst in a reactor to convert carbon dioxide into methane. Known as the "Sabatier reaction" from the late French chemist Paul Sabatier, it's a process the International Space Station uses to scrub the carbon dioxide from air the astronauts breathe and generate rocket fuel to keep the station in high orbit. But Wu is thinking much bigger.

The Martian atmosphere is composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide. Astronauts could save half the fuel they need for a return trip home by making what they need on the red planet once they arrive, Wu said. "It's like a gas station on Mars. You could easily pump carbon dioxide through this reactor and produce methane for a rocket," Wu said. UC's study was published in the journal Nature Communications with collaborators from Rice University, Shanghai University and East China University of Science and Technology. Wu began his career in chemical engineering by studying fuel cells for electric vehicles but began looking at carbon dioxide conversion in his chemical engineering lab about 10 years ago.

"I realized that greenhouse gases were going to be a big issue in society," Wu said. "A lot of countries realized that carbon dioxide is a big issue for the sustainable development of our society. That's why I think we need to achieve carbon neutrality." The Biden Administration has set a goal of achieving a 50% reduction in greenhouse gas pollutants by 2030 and an economy that relies on renewable energy by 2050. "That means we'll have to recycle carbon dioxide," Wu said. Wu and his students, including lead author and UC doctoral candidate Tianyu Zhang, are experimenting with different catalysts such as graphene quantum dots -- layers of carbon just nanometers big -- that can increase the yield of methane.

Searches for Covid-19 tests on Google are surging as the delta variant spreads in the U.S. and more employers and large-scale events require testing. From a report: The number of Americans looking up "at-home Covid test near me" on the platform has doubled in the past month, according to Google Trends, while those asking how long rapid test results take is up by 250%. In the past week, users were also more interested in searches related to tests, rather than vaccines, in most states, with Louisiana and Mississippi as exceptions. The highly contagious delta variant has kept cases high in the U.S. This is creating the need for more tests as children return to school, workplaces resume activities and consumers head back to concerts and events. This appears to have taken manufacturers by surprise after months of flagging demand. The Biden administration also recently announced plans to require either vaccination or weekly testing for companies with 100 or more employees. That comes on top of the federal-worker mandate.

Thousands of scientific studies had to toss out weeks of data because of a 56-second TikTok video by a teenager. From a report: The July 23rd video is short and simple. It opens with recent Florida high school graduate and self-described "teen author" Sarah Frank sitting in her bedroom and smiling at the camera. "Welcome to side hustles I recommend trying -- part one," she says in the video, pointing users to the website Prolific.co. "Basically, it's a bunch of surveys for different amounts of money and different amounts of time." That video got 4.1 million views in the month after it was posted and sent tens of thousands of new users flooding to the Prolific platform. Prolific, a tool for scientists conducting behavioral research, had no screening tools in place to make sure that it delivered representative population samples to each study. Suddenly, scientists used to getting a wide mix of subjects for their Prolific studies saw their surveys flooded with responses from young women around Frank's age.

Though not particularly well known, Prolific is part of a small collection of online tools that have transformed the way corporations and scientists study the way people think and act. The first and largest of these research platforms is Amazon-owned Mechanical Turk, which was released in 2005 as a general-purpose platform for crowdsourcing work on repetitive tasks. Soon after it was released, behavioral scientists realized its potential value for their research, and it quickly revolutionized several research fields. [...] The Behavioral Lab at Stanford mainly uses the newer, smaller Prolific platform for online studies these days, said Nicholas Hall, director of the Behavioral Lab at the Stanford School of Business. While many Mechanical Turk customers are big businesses conducting corporate research, Prolific gears its product to scientists.

The smaller platform offers more transparency, promises to treat survey participants more ethically, and promises higher-quality research subjects than alternative platforms like Mechanical Turk. Scientists doing this sort of research in the United States generally want a pool of subjects who speak English as a first language, are not too practiced at taking psychological surveys, and together make up a reasonably representative demographic sample of the American population. Prolific, most agreed, did a good job providing high-quality subjects. The sudden change in the platform's demographics threatened to upend that reputation. In the days and weeks after Frank posted her video, researchers scrambled to figure out what was happening to their studies. A member of the Stanford Behavioral Laboratory posted on a Prolific forum, "we have noticed a huge leap in the number of participants on the platform in the US Pool, from 40k to 80k. Which is great, however, now a lot of our studies have a gender skew where maybe 85% of participants are women. Plus the age has been averaging around 21."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Engineers at Columbia University [...] figured out how to simultaneously 3D-print and cook layers of pureed chicken, according to a recent paper published in the journal npj Science of Food. [...] The scientists purchased raw chicken breast from a local convenience store and then pureed it in a food processor to get a smooth, uniform consistency. They removed any tendons and refrigerated the samples before repackaging them into 3D-printing syringe barrels to avoid clogging. The cooking apparatus used a high-powered diode laser, a set of mirror galvanometers (devices that detect electrical current by deflecting light beams), a fixture for custom 3D printing, laser shielding, and a removable tray on which to cook the 3D-printed chicken.

"During initial laser cooking, our laser diode was mounted in the 3D-printed fixture, but as the experiments progressed, we transitioned to a setup where the laser was vertically mounted to the head of the extrusion mechanism," the authors wrote. "This setup allowed us to print and cook ingredients on the same machine." They also experimented with cooking the printed chicken after sealing it in plastic packaging. The results? The laser-cooked chicken retained twice as much moisture as conventionally cooked chicken, and it shrank half as much while still retaining similar flavors. But different types of lasers produced different results. The blue laser proved ideal for cooking the chicken internally, beneath the surface, while the infrared lasers were better at surface-level browning and broiling. As for the chicken in plastic packaging, the blue laser did achieve slight browning, but the near-infrared laser was more efficient at browning the chicken through the packaging. The team was even able to brown the surface of the packaged chicken in a pattern reminiscent of grill marks.

"Millimeter-scale precision allows printing and cooking a burger that has a level of done-ness varying from rare to well-done in a lace, checkerboard, gradient, or other custom pattern," the authors wrote. "Heat from a laser can also cook and brown foods within a sealed package... [which] could significantly increase their shelf life by reducing their microbial contamination, and has great commercial applications for packaged to-go meals at the grocery store, for example." To make sure the 3D-printed chicken still appealed to the human palate, the team served samples of both 3D-printed laser cooked and conventionally cooked chicken to two taste testers. It's not a significant sample size, but both taste testers preferred the laser-cooked chicken over the conventionally cooked chicken, mostly because it was less dry and rubbery and had a more pleasing texture. One tester was even able to identify which sample was the laser-cooked chicken and did note a slight metallic taste from the laser heating.