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Soon, your avocados will last longer thanks to a Bill Gates-funded startup

Eating all your avocados at peak ripeness before they spoil is a feat that takes some serious planning. If you slice them too early, you have a hard, inedible center, but if you’re too late, you have a mushy, brown avocado that heads straight to the trash can. But Apeel Sciences, a California-based startup company that counts Bill Gates among its investors, says it has developed a way to keep avocados, and other produce, ripe and delicious for twice as long. The gif below, courtesy of CBS This Morning, shows how strawberries treated with the new product stand up to strawberries left untreated. via GIPHY Apeel uses food waste and other plant material to create a coating on produce that delays the aging process. The coating mimics the natural peel or skin that already protects the produce, and can replace the wax that grocery stores currently use. Aside from saving consumers from fruit and…

New tearless onions make kitchen prep less of a pain

Lots of great recipes require onions, so sadly, there’s no getting around it — the tears, the stuffy nose, the smelly hands. But after years of kitchen struggles and decades of work, scientists have finally figured out a solution to take away at least one of our complaints. Enter: The Sunion. They taste just like regular onions with a sweet and crunchy snap, but unlike other store-bought onions, Sunions won’t make you weep. They were created through natural cross-breeding over more than 30 years rather than using genetic modifications. When you cut into an ordinary onion, a volatile compound called lachrymatory-factor synthase is released. When this gas hits your eyes, you body produces tears in attempt to reduce the irritation, which is why you appear to cry. Sunions have been bred to have decreasing amounts of this compound, resulting in an onion that doesn’t release tear-causing gas when sliced and diced. Sunions made their debut back…