Would you eat this? 


In the future, you might have to. If food and everything else becomes as scarce as some experts think it will in a world with nine billion people and a barren ecology, you’ll eat anything you can get your hands on—even if it’s rotten.

That could be a problem, healthwise. Which is why a student at London’s Royal College of Art is thinking about synthetic biology, products that would give us the ability of hyenas to eat even the most putrid things. A kind of inhaler, perhaps, to ingest hyena’s stomach-hardening bacteria, smell-altering and taste-bud-tricking devices to get past our psychological as well as physical repulsion. Just some of the engineering we may need in a literally spoiled world.

—Tim Gihring, editor

April 2, 2015

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Source: QZ.com, March 31, 2015