The heat is on for chicken-sexers

The art of telling the sex of a chicken is being revived just as new technology threatens to make it redundant. The European Social Fund is giving training grants in the skill, which is invaluable for the food industry - egg producers want only female birds and meat producers want only males. But researchers at Manchester University have discovered how to manipulate a chicken's sex by controlling the temperature at which eggs are incubated at a particular stage in development. 'This should greatly increase the productivity of the poultry industry, as well as greatly decreasing the deaths of millions of newly hatched chickens,' Professor Mark Ferguson, who is leading the research, said.