🧬 The Distilled Download - Jan 5

Greetings, fellow science nerds! 🤓 Here’s your latest installment of The Distilled Download.

My experiment this past month has been to drink a mug of my Ultimate Carotenoid Soup to try and change my skin color–and it’s working! Here’s the video comparison if you missed it–and the recipe. It’s pretty healthy as is, but I like to have protein with every meal so I’ve been defrosting a mason jar of it each morning and then blending it with a scoop of whey protein. Still quite tasty!

I’ve also been going down a super winding rabbit hole on Red Light Therapy (and NIR, a.k.a. photobiomodulation). Expect a lot more on this soon. Quick preview: it works for all sorts of health benefits, but most brands are way overpriced. Light is light. I’m considering setting up a group-buy from the brand I got my device from in China (it’s one of the main ones that a lot of these fancy brands slap their labels on and triple the price) so let me know if you’re interested.

And now.

The Download

📚 New Study: Lab-grown Coffee Coming Soon?
Coffee is one of the most widely consumed substances on the planet. But parts of the production industry are exploitative and have lots of associated environmental problems like deforestation. In this proof-of-concept study from Espoo, Finland they grew coffee cells in bioreactors, with fairly good results. It’s not going to win any competitions yet, and scaling is always a challenge, but in another 10-20 years I could definitely see more of our food coming from this type of process.

📱Social Media Post That Made Me 👏 & LOL
“Eat Poop to Lose Fat!” by Layne Norton. He always manages to bring some serious sass to his debunking efforts, but this analogy was fantastic. He highlights a common tactic used in the health and wellness industry to sell products based on cherry-picking scientific research, by showing how the same level of rigor could be used to PROVE why eating poop is good for you 😂

🎁 Gift That Was Unexpectedly Amazing
I got my fiancé a human-sized dog bed, and it is FANTASTIC. She loves soft and cozy things, so I figured I’d take a chance and see if it was worth the hype. Result? After she came back from almost a month of being away, she ended up falling asleep in it for the first three nights in a row instead of coming to bed. I couldn’t decide if I should be flattered or insulted 😂. It’s perfectly sized for a single person to have a comfy amount of space, but also perfect for duo-cuddles.

 🧬 2023 Science Win
Organ transplants save lives, but way too many people never get the organ they need in time. One of the biggest obstacles is the need for the organ to be fresh–unlike with blood banks where they can keep it stored for weeks. This past June, researchers were successfully able to transplant rat kidneys that had been cryogenically frozen for 100 days! They used a “nanowarming” technique, employing alternating magnetic fields to heat nanoparticles within the organ vasculature, to achieve both rapid and uniform warming. If we can make this work for humans we’d save tons of lives!

Thanks for reading! I love to hear feedback, so feel free to respond to this email or tag me on Twitter or Threads (which I’ll start using seriously one of these days 🙊).