possible

"It's possible this ability to digest dairy was important to survival during periods of crop failure, food scarcity and disease," Narasimhan said.

"Ask the wider society: what do we want our country to look like in 100 years? What do we really care about? And then visualise possible futures."

The new method makes it possible to design large new proteins better than before and to tailor them to the desired properties, for example, to bind precisely to other proteins.

Though nausea was the main driver of food waste, the results hinted at another possible influence: changes in preferences and habits that led people to toss foods that had fallen out of favor.

The problem is that it has so far not been possible to develop drugs that bind copper ions with sufficient affinity to "take them away" from copper-binding biomolecules.