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Would you be able to cite these projects please?

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Not a food scientist, but the explanation I've heard is that some bacteria produce toxins as metabolic byproducts that aren't destroyed by cooking. You can have a hamburger that had a colony of E. coli living in it that's cooked well done and become sick from the toxins left behind.

Also, undercooking can leave some bacteria alive. If a piece of meat has a small amount of bacteria right before cooking, this will probably be fine. If it was heavily contaminated at the source and packed with bacteria by the time it's cooked, 10% remaining of a huge amount is enough to colonize you and make you sick.

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> it's probably a large mix of metals but it's probably the heaviest metals in the inner core right?

Actually, no. The core is predominantly iron with a smaller amount of nickel (and some other stuff, more on that in the next section), which while both dense, are certainly not the most dense metals that exists on Earth and in fact, many significantly more dense metals tend to be concentrated in either the crust or mantle as opposed to the core. The reason for this largely relates back to the early formation of rocky planets (and here most of my answer will focus on Earth, but this is broadly applicable to rocky planets more generally). During planetary differentiation, there are two primary ways by which materials separated, physically (i.e., mostly on the basis of density) and chemically. For the chemical differentiation aspect, it's useful to consider the Goldschmit classification of the elements. Regardless of their density, generally lithophile elements, which are those that easily combine with oxygen, and chalcophile elements, which are those that easily combine with sulfur and a few other elements, were incorporated into the silicate part of the Earth and thus remained in the mantle and crust. As examples, very dense metals like uranium and lead are both thought to generally be in very low (to zero) concentrations in the core. This is because uranium is a lithophile and lead is a chalcophile so both are generally concentrated in the crust and mantle (not to mention that a non-trivial component of lead results from the decay of uranium and thorium, both lithophiles, after differentiation). Siderophiles were those that easily dissolved in iron and thus ended up primarily in the core. The density driven portion of differentiation provided the main division between the denser, inner iron-nickel core and the less dense, outer silicate portion of the Earth, but whether a particular element ended up in the silicate portion or the core came down to the individual chemical properties of the element in question, i.e. was it more likely to bond or dissolve in a silicate melt vs an iron melt.

> Not sure if it would make a tough alloy or something.

As discussed above, the core is predominantly iron with a small amount of nickel (constrained to being around 5%), so usually described as an iron-nickel alloy. However, we know from a variety of different datasets that the density of the core is actually less than what you'd expect for pure iron or a 95-5% iron-nickel alloy (and that various other properties, mostly related to how seismic waves pass through it are similarly not consistent with a pure iron or a pure iron-nickel alloy) and that the core must include some amount of a light element or several light elements. As highlighted in the review by Hirose et al., 2013, on the basis of abundances (i.e., what elements were present) and their ability to partition into the core during planet formation, we hypothesize that these light elements are silicon, oxygen, sulfur, carbon, and/or hydrogen. In terms of the properties of the resulting alloy, a lot depends on which one of these (or which mixture of these) are actually present in the core. The Hirose review goes through some of the details of specific two-component alloys (e.g., Fe-C, Fe-Si, etc) from high pressure/temperature experiments, but for some of these it's actually pretty challenging to get them to alloy with iron given the conditions we can and cannot simulate in experiments. Checking in on a more current review by Hirose et al., 2021 (pdf or a preprint of this article here), we find the situation pretty much the same, i.e., we still think that the core needs some light elements, the list of the possible ones are the same, and we still don't really know which ones are the right ones within that list. What this new review does provide is updated indications of just how much of different elements might be present. These have ranges of uncertainties, but most max out at ~1-5%, but it varies by element and by the way the estimate is derived. The extent to which any of these alloys would be "tough" is a bit unclear since (1) that's not exactly a clear property, (2) we don't know the exact composition, and (3) it's hard to get materials up to the relevant temperature and pressures to do detailed studies of the material properties in the same way we would for an alloy that's stable at surface temps and pressures.

EDIT: I'll add that we can learn some details about the cores of rocky planets from the study of iron meteorites, which are generally thought to be chunks of differentiated bodies that were destroyed during the early history of the solar system. Since they're no longer at core temperatures and pressures, the exact properties of these are a bit different than what you'd expect if they were at core temperatures and pressures, but they definitely inform a bit on composition. I'll also highlight the upcoming Psyche NASA mission, which is going to visit the 16-Psyche asteroid, which is might be a large chunk of a left over core of a planetesimal.

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The major difference with insects is that the muscle is inside the "bone".

Scaling that up you'd have something like a crab. Scale it up more and you definitely enough meat to have steak.

The size makes it hard to separate the meat from everything else. Can still make a nutrient-rich meal of it, and given how fast they breed and mature it's quite efficient to farm. Processing it in to something people would readily consume is the hard part.

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They are not literally insects, they are decapod crustaceans, but both crustaceans and insects are both arthropods. Taxonomically, within the phylum of arthropods, there is the subphylum of crustaceans, and within that the class Malacostraca (soft shell), which contains the order decapods, where crabs, lobsters and shrimp are found. Separately, within the phylum of arthropods is subphylum hexapods, within which the class insects exists. Insects and decapod crustaceans are relatively similar, but not the same.

Because a lot of people like to eat steak rare.

But chicken carcasses for instance, are processed in a way that pretty much guarantees faecal contamination, which is where the salmonella risk comes from. But you can process chickens more carefully and eat the meat rare if you like - it would just make chicken much more expensive in the western world.

Cooking certainly isn’t a failsafe way to render any and all food safe to eat though. If it were, we wouldn’t need to worry about a bunch of other food safety stuff either.

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