A nice meal is a nice meal, regardless of the price. But if you want to show off your considerable fortunes, try serving up a few of these ingredients in your next culinary creation. (Maybe if you're a newly-minted billionaire, recently married... and have a penchant for killing your own food?)

• If you like really expensive vegetables, forget white asparagus, hop shoots are where it's at. But unless they're specially cultivated, the shoots will turn green and become tough and rope-like. [url]
• European white truffles go for thousands of dollars per pound, found by trained dogs (not pigs who will sometimes eat the fungus). Time to start cultivating these in a lab -- or at least a quick DNA test to confirm the species... [url]
• About 150 flowers are needed to produce one gram of saffron -- and a lot of human labor. Fortunately, it doesn't take a lot to impart its flavor into foods, but avoid the fake stuff and don't buy ground saffron. [url]
• To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

We've noted before that the classification of living things is a bit tricky. It's not just plants and animals anymore. Biologists are continuously discovering creatures that defy the old taxonomies. Here are just a few more examples of the incredible diversity of life on our planet.

• Christoph Adami tries to define life -- by studying artificial life and the characteristics of information processes that seem to behave like life. His self-replicating programs evolve and create virtual ecosystems -- and could help figure out how to find extraterrestrial life. [url]
• Biologists thought they had only cataloged about 10% of all fungal species. But there could be a whole different domain of life that is similar to fungus, but isn't. [url]
• Mantaphasmatodes is the first new insect order discovered since the 1900s. And these insects are almost everywhere. [url]
• To discover more interesting biological curiosities, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Fungi are fascinating organisms. They can grow on almost anything and decompose all kinds of materials into soil and other useful stuff. Folks are finding more and more uses for these sometimes-tasty-or-sometimes-poisonous little suckers. So here are a just few fun links on fungi.

• A mystery fungus that covered an entire town turned out to really like the vaporized ethanol produced by the local whiskey distilleries. So now the joke about a mushroom walking into a bar actually has a bit more to it. [url]
• If you want to learn how to grow your own fungus, there are a bunch of seminars waiting for you. You'll have to wait until 2012 for an opening, though. [url]
• Growing gourmet mushrooms can actually be a nice little business. Especially if you can grow your shrooms on waste materials like coffee grounds and sell the mushroom soil. [url]
• To discover more food-related links, check out what's floating around in StumbleUpon. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

The Earth's biosphere has some incredible diversity, and biologists have hardly even begun to scratch the surface. There used to be just the Plant and Animal Kingdoms, and then there were as many as six "kingdoms of life" -- but recent discoveries have made the classification of eukaryotes a bit messy for biologists to agree upon. Here are some examples of a couple of strange species and an ambitious project to create a virtual biosphere that could become as intricate as the one we live in.

• Spongiforma squarepantsii is a recently discovered fungus that looks like a sponge (but doesn't live under the sea). It looks like biologists need more formal naming conventions. [url]
• Bacteria that can live on pure caffeine were found in a nice flowerbed in Iowa. And researchers have isolated the enzymes that can metabolize caffeine -- potentially to be used in a new "organic" way to remove caffeine from coffee/tea. [url]
• Steve Grand isn't trying to discover new life in the real world. He's trying to build virtual lifeforms from "complex networks of virtual brain cells and biochemical reactions and genes." The final product will be a video game called Grandroids -- virtually descended from Grand's popular 1996 game, Creatures. [url]
• To discover more interesting biological curiosities, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

Nuclear power seems to have gotten more intense scrutiny recently, so taking a look at other alternative energy technologies makes sense. There's no silver bullet to solve the world's energy problems, but exploring the diversity of ways to generate electricity and fuels is probably a good strategy. Here are some interesting discoveries that might help wean us off burning non-renewable hydrocarbons.

• MIT's Alcator C-Mod fusion reactor is experimenting with a new mode of operation for a tokamak-style reactor design. Scientists still don't quite understand why it works, but it could help make fusion reactors operate more predictably and actually generate more energy than they consume. [url]
• Making biofuels from algae has received some significant funding, but the process of growing the right kind of algae and separating out the fuel is still at least 5-10 years away. A few hundred million bucks should be able to screen a few thousand varieties of algae for optimum biofuel production, though. [url]
• There's also a type of fungus that can produce hydrocarbons similar to diesel fuel. This kind of fungus could also have been originally responsible for creating fossil fuels from ancient organic plant matter. [url]
• To discover more stuff on alternative energy, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

As always, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

We've pointed out some smart birds recently, but we shouldn't leave out the other smart critters out there. They might be smart enough to be offended, after all. So here are a few more examples of animals that might be able to look at themselves in the mirror and recognize they're still alone.

• Here's a list of 9 other species that exhibit some form of intelligence that we've actually observed. It'd be a more impressive list if there were a way to really quantify and rank the varying degrees of intelligence, but then humans might not look so good on such a scale... [url]
• I think someone snuck in their pet dog into this photo gallery of smart animals (all with human-granted names). Apsalah the orangutan seems a bit over-represented, too. [url]
• A few types of parasitic fungus can turn ants into zombie-slaves. Maybe it's not intelligence, but these fungi are often cited as an example of intelligent design (though doesn't explain why an intelligent designer would ever create such a roundabout process). [url]
• To discover more biological phenomena, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

As always, StumbleUpon can also recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.