Onions that won’t make you cry when you chop

Good news! Now there will be no more shedding of tears while chopping the onions. After 30 years of work, the ‘sunion’ — a new sweeter, crunchier, smaller type of onion — could soon hit the shelves.

The sunion’s been created through natural cross-breeding rather than genetic modification, so it’s not packed with scary stuff that dries out your tear ducts. Instead, sunions simply don’t release as much lachrymatory-factor synthase — a volatile compound that forms sulphuric acid when it comes into contact with the water in your eyes, triggering the body to produce tears. That makes a sweeter, milder onion without any tears.

Bayer, the company that spent years developing the onions, say they certify sunions are tearless before releasing them to the market. They’ll be sold in the US from March onwards, as sunions are currently only being grown in Nevada and Washington, where the climate is ideal for the crop. But the bad news is they are only planning to bring them over to the UK, not the world over!

World’s heaviest avocado

Guinness World Records officially named a Hawaii woman’s massive avocado the world’s heaviest.

Pamela Wang earned the world record for heaviest avocado after stumbling upon the gargantuan green fruit, which weighed 5 pounds, 3.6 ounces.

She found the record-breaking avocado while walking in Kealakekua, near Konawaena High School, Hawaii, on November 26 and instantly realised she had found something special.

“I see avocados every day and I pick up avocados every day, but this one ... it was hard to miss,” Wang said. “It was as big as my head.”

Wang weighed the avocado in the presence of an independent witness — Ken Love, executive director of Hawaii Tropical Fruit Growers — for Guinness’ consideration.

She then shared the bounty with friends and customers at Florian’s Cafe.

A library with trashed books

Garbage collectors in the Turkish capital of Ankara have opened a public library filled with discarded books.

The library, created inside of an abandoned brick factory, is composed of items once destined for the landfill, including the shelves that hold the thrown-away books and paintings that decorate the wall.

The library’s collection was gathered by sanitation workers for months and then later, expanded by residents who began donating books directly, CNN reported.

The 6,000 available books include everything from fiction, non-fiction, children’s books, comic books, books used for scientific research and books in different languages such as English and French.

“I am very sad that these books are thrown to garbage like bread. Our society needs to show more awareness. This is a huge loss. It is a big thing when one child reads one book and learns one word from it,” a local Ankara resident said.

Published in Dawn, Young World, February 17th, 2018