🧬 The Distilled Download - May 10

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

I’ve been a bit MIA lately, having spent a few weeks traveling and visiting family over Passover. But I never stop reading science, and I’ve been working on many research projects, which I hope to share with you all soon!

And now.

The Download

🧠 Mind-Blowing Image of… a Mind
We’ve always known that the human brain is amazingly complex, but we’ve never actually seen it in full detail–until now. Researchers took a 1mm (cubic) brain fragment from a 45-year-old epilepsy patient, cut it into 5,000 slices, each only 34nm thick, scanned them with an electron microscope, and stitched them all together with an AI program to create a 3D render. That tiny chunk contained ~57,000 cells and 150 million synapses — the connections between neurons. Storing it all took 1.4 petabytes of space. They’re still analyzing all the data, but so far, they’ve discovered all sorts of cool structures and relationships between neurons that we’ve never seen before.

Because scientists are awesome, they made it all available for free online for us to play with 🤓 .

⚠️ Terrifying Piece of US Nuclear History I Just Learned
During the cold war, the US had more than 1,000 nuclear missiles, all safely locked behind “nuclear launch codes.” These were supposed to ensure that they couldn’t actually be launched without the direct authorization of the president. Except… apparently, as soon as the code-locks were installed on the missiles, the US Strategic Command generals had them all set to “00000000” so that there wouldn’t be any extra delays in case they were needed. The code stayed the same for almost twenty years. This all came out in 2004, in an interview with Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

Yet another thing the movies got wrong… but this time I don’t blame them 🤦‍♂️.

🦾 Is Training to Failure Necessary?
A new study had people do leg presses and extensions to failure on one leg but stopping 1-2 reps shy of failure on the other. These were people who exercised regularly and were eating a caloric surplus. They still did the same total number of reps per exercise session because the “not to failure” leg could go a bit longer at the end.

The result? After 8 weeks, both legs showed identical muscle growth. Stopping short of failure could allow for more total reps, making this the ideal strategy (pushing the very last set to failure could also benefit, though).

☕ Coffee vs Cancer?
Has anyone ever yelled at you for drinking “too much” coffee? A new study in cancer patients found that ~4 cups per day is “just right.” It looked at 1,700 patients diagnosed with stages I-III colorectal cancer, and found that those who drank 4+ cups per day had a 32% lowered risk of their cancer flaring up again compared to those who drank <2 per day. They also found a U-shaped curve of All-Cause Mortality vs coffee consumption, with the lowest risk being 4 cups per day, having 68% risk of dying ((HR: 0.68, 95% CI: 0.53, 0.88). We can’t fully pull causation from this type of study, but it bodes well for fellow brew-lovers 🙂 

Recent Video Highlight

Catnip Explained – Ever wonder why cats evolved a bunch of weird behaviors around catnip? Here, I go into many of the details of how it can be useful for humans! (No, it can’t get us high)

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 🙊).