Microbes love to eat our nastiest by-products, like fat, oil, and grease. Instead of using caustic chemicals to clean up messes, why not just employ nature’s garbage men?

The latest effort to decipher the unique aroma signature of the durian — revered as the “king of fruits” in southeast Asia but reviled elsewhere as the world’s foulest smelling food — has uncovered several new substances that contribute to the fragrance. The research appears in ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

While lauding their efficiency, public health officials in the US are bemoaning the fact that new diagnostic tests inadvertently undercut surveillance and traceability of outbreaks of food poisoning back to their source.

Potch's North-West University is home to world-class extrusion technology - a feat that was recently hailed at camput celebrations. What initially started in 1994 as a dream of Prof LJ Grobler, dean of the Faculty of Engineering, over time has evolved into technology that can compete with the global best.

UK-based consumer goods giant, Reckitt Benckiser, has clinched an £882-million (€1.09bn) deal, and outbid German pharma firm, Bayer, for the US’s second-biggest dietary supplements firm, Schiff Nutrition International, giving it a foothold in the £18-billion vitamins and nutrition pills market.

A breakthrough whey protein developed by Arla Foods Ingredients will, it claims, for the first time enable companies to produce very high protein sports drinks that taste good.

Many technologies have been developed to promote the shelf life of fruit and vegetables in the home - and now there's a new one. Introducing FreshPaper, claimed to keep such foods fresh two to four times longer than normal – and it does so using spices.

A food scientist at Indiana’s Purdue University has created a “radiant fryer” that results in fried food with all the flavour, but up to half the fat and fewer calories than food cooked using conventional methods.