🧬 The Distilled Download - July 5

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

For the last few weeks, I’ve been focusing on coding a cool software package that uses a ton of AI magic to analyze social media accounts and figure out what makes a video take off. It’s already quite useful, but it still has a ways to go. Ironically, this has come at the expense of me doing the #1 required thing for a successful video: actually filming and posting something. But the research never stops, and I’ve got a lot of fun content planned for you guys in the near future 🙂 

And now.

The Download

🦟 What Makes You Super Attractive… To Mosquitos
Mosquitos don’t play fair. By the end of a barbecue, there’s always the one person who ends up fully covered in bites, being made fun of by the guy who got off scot-free. This week, I decided to get to the bottom of why this might be–which for me means reading dozens of research studies. It turns out that, as with many health topics, it’s a mix of environmental and genetic factors. There’s some medium-quality evidence pointing to blood type mattering, with the bloodsuckers preferring O > B > A ~= AB. Pregnant women attract them more. Eating garlic doesn’t seem to help. Drinking beer and eating bananas both might make you more attractive to them.

If you want to see a full article/video series on the topic, let me know!

🍷 Wine I’d Be Scared to Drink
Back in 2019, archeologists delving through an old Roman mausoleum in southern Spain found an old urn containing a reddish liquid. They dated it back 2,000 to the first century CE, but it’s taken them a long time to figure out exactly what the liquid was. Now, using a bunch of Science Magic, a.k.a inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) and high-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (HPLC-MS), they’ve been able to conclusively identify it as white wine–making it the oldest wine in the world. The question is…. would you taste it?

🤖 Gadget That Makes My Smart-home Work
Isn’t it annoying how so many devices these days still operate via IR remotes? Especially most air conditioning units and a lot of funky lighting. A while back, I discovered this WiFi-enabled universal remote that lets me program my lights and AC to go on and off based on triggers from my indoor temperature sensor/air quality monitor, timers, and various voice-activated controls. It can connect to just about anything.

🤺 Podcast I’ve Been Enjoying
If you like learning about history, I hope you’ve already encountered Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History series. He does an amazing job of taking periods of history and doing multi-hour deep dives into them, taking an academic historian’s perspective and turning it into an engaging story. Each episode or series takes him months of work, so I get excited when a new one finally drops. Last month, he came out with a four-hour episode on Alexander the Great, and it’s a fascinating listen!

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 🙊).