Scientists invent the tear-free onion

Finally, an invention that rights some of nature’s most heinous wrongs, the tear-free onion.

These days there’s no shortage of pointless inventions. We’ll ask you to cast your minds back to the time of the dancing flower. It wasn’t aesthetically pleasing and it wasn’t entertaining (once the initial surprise had worn off). Yet for some reason, it enjoyed success in the year dot, not to mention a brief comeback as the dancing flower MP3 speaker during Christmas of 2007.

Scientists seem to have realised that these days, we will not be quieted with such pointless products and impressing us involves much more than a singing fish. Ok, the fish was pretty good, but only because it was a fish.

Scientists have created a "tear-free" onion using Australian-developed biotechnology to switch off the gene behind the enzyme that turns us into a weepy mess.

The New Zealand research institute Crop and Food used gene-silencing technology to make the breakthrough. Bad news is, prototypes won’t hit the market for another decade, which means, years more slicing, dicing and crying.

Colin Eady, the institute’s senior scientist told the Herald Sun that Japanese scientists played a major role in the breakthrough,

"We previously thought the tearing agent was produced spontaneously by cutting onions, but they [Japanese scientists] proved it was controlled by an enzyme,’’ he said.

"Here in New Zealand we had the ability to insert DNA into onions, using gene-silencing technology developed by Australian scientists.”

He then went on to say that the modified onion might even taste better than the weepier version.

Read more on The Herald Sun