The world's first no-kill eggs have gone on sale after scientists found a way to determine a chick's sex before it hatches businessinsider.in/science/the-wo… 
The first no-kill eggs in the world have gone on sale in Germany after scientists discovered how to tell a chick's sex while it is still an embryo.
Humans have long relied on chickens for meat and eggs, but male chicks are not used for either purpose. They grow too slowly for people to invest in feeding them long enough to produce meat, and they are unable to lay eggs.
For these reasons, between 4 and 6 billion male chicks are killed around the world each year.
As The Guardian reported, male chicks are either suffocated or fed alive into high-speed grinders that turn the chicks into reptile food.
"Seleggt," the new process patented by German scientists, could put an end to this slaughter. According to The Guardian, the technology can figure out a chick's sex only nine days after an egg is fertilized, ensuring that only female eggs hatch after 21 days of incubation.
"If you can determine the sex of a hatching egg you can entirely dispense with the culling of live male chicks," #Seleggt managing director Ludger Breloh told The Guardian.
Breloh told The Guardian that the new method draws on a discovery made by Almuth Einspanier, a professor at the University of Leipzig. Einspanier created a chemical marker that can detect a hormone that's only abundant in female chick eggs.
The marker, when mixed with fluid from a chick egg nine days after fertilization, turns white in females and blue in males.
This process, which allows hatcheries to collect fluid without touching the eggs, only takes one second per egg, The Guardian reported.
Many companies have previously said they are closing in on presenting technology that could determine the sex of a chick before it hatches.
But despite a growing interest in putting an end to the killing of male chicks, only Seleggt managed to commercialize its technology as of December.
