You Can't Make Chocolate Milk By Feeding a Cow Chocolate

In last week's episode of Fringe , the man who is fast becoming my favorite mad scientist, Walter Bishop, tried to make a cow lactate chocolate milk by feeding it cocoa beans. Obviously this doesn't work. Which is too bad. I spent a lot of time trying to see if one could flavor milk by feeding cows different things, but unsurprisingly, their stomachs digest most of the flavor out of what they eat. Not that feed is irrelevant. As it happens, putting turmeric and coriander into cattle feed may reduce the production of global-warming inducing methane, according to research from Newcastle University in the United Kingdom. Methane is actually much more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, so the vast quantity of methane produced by the world's millions of cows and sheep is a significant contributor to global warming. Mostly it's the bacteria that live in the cows' digestive ...