[Source Photo: galitskaya/iStock] advertisement advertisement It’s a particularly gruesome part of the chicken industry: When chicks are born at hatcheries, the males are immediately thrown in grinders and “live-shredded” to death, or killed by suffocation or gassing. Since male chicks will never grow up to lay eggs, and because roosters are too small to be used for meat, the industry has no use for them. Billions are killed each year, after hatcheries have invested the money and energy needed to incubate each egg. advertisement [Photo: Omri Adar]That’s changing as new technologies to identify the sex of chicken eggs come to market, making it possible to literally count your chickens before they hatch. One solution, from a startup based in Israel, uses the gene-editing technology CRISPR to place a tiny biomarker on the male chromosome. When the egg goes through a scanner, the biomarker glows, and it’s possible to separate the egg out for uses in other industries (like pharmaceuticals, potentially, or cosmetics).