Dec. 15, 2018
Hello friend! Welcome to Scrap Facts.
I'm a reporter covering health and science with insatiable curiosity. I love everything I learn, not all of which gets its own story. Each week, I'll bring you some of my favorite facts that I picked up on the job or while out living life.
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Please note: December has been proving to be a busy month! I’ll be off next week once more for vacation, and back in your inbox for the last issue of the year on Dec. 30.
Doctors have been hoping to make xenotransplants possible for multiple centuries.
Found while reporting: After over 50 years of human heart transplants, we may be ready for ones from pigs and Researchers are ready to test pig skin transplants on humans for the first time.
The future of organ transplants won’t involve human donors.
At least, that’s goal of a lot of transplant scientists. Getting tissue or organs from human donors is difficult: They either have to die in precisely the right setting (brain dead, in a hospital equipped to perform the organ harvest quickly) or they have to be living donors willing to go through an extensive surgery. As such, there simply aren’t enough human organs for every patient who needs them.
Medical researchers have always eyed animals as a possible solution. Animal-to-human transplantation is called xenotransplantation, and in the past two weeks, scientists made two major breakthroughs in the field. First, a team showed that baboons with pig hearts could survive about half a year, bringing us closer to the possibility of clinical trials. Then, a small company got approval to start a clinical trial for temporary pig skin grafts. Both of these developments happened thanks to the ability to genetically modify pigs to make them more similar to humans.
It has taken scientists literal centuries to get to this point. Although modern doctors wouldn’t dream of testing xenotransplantation on patients, up through the middle of the 20th century things were a little more lax. Here are some choice facts from this fabulous history of xenotransplantation by a renowned transplantation scientist:
Scientists have used sheep, rabbits, dogs, cats, rats, chickens, pigeons, and frogs for skin grafts through the 20th century.
In 1838, doctors gave a patient a new cornea from a pig (the success of which was not discussed).
Serge Voronoff, a Russian physician working in Paris, tried to give diabetic patients pig pancreatic cells. He actually had pretty good instincts in this case, but he also tried to insert chimp testicles into older men’s testicles to try to restore their virility. HUNDREDS OF MEN SIGNED UP FOR THIS PROCEDURE.
And finally, in the 1960s, Keith Reemtsma, a physician working at Tulane, gave 13 people with kidney failure chimp kidneys. Most of these people died, but one patient lived for a full nine months.
Even designers at Apple make mistakes when they’re hastily ambitious.
Found while reporting: Apple’s squid emoji had something stuck to its face for two years and no one said anything.
This was a story about squid in which I found a shared human experience.
If you have an Apple smart phone, you may have noticed that your squid emoji features a pasta-shaped tube that looks like a nose. This is presumably supposed to be the siphon, which squid and other cephalopods use to propel themselves through the water (and also poop). However, on real squid, the siphon is on the back.
A writer for Gizmodo pointed out that Apple’s emoji designers are the ones who screwed it up (emojis appear differently on every platform they’re used on). It’s true that Apple’s squid emojis are the only ones with a front siphon. But they’re also the only ones with a siphon at all; no one else bothered to try to include them.
Half the time I screw up, it’s because I’ve been trying to be too ambitious, without taking enough time to double-check my work. When this happens, I tend to assume that I am the only person in the world foolish enough to make this kind of mistake, and that maybe, my whole life has been an embarrassing blunder.
But no, folks: mistakes are a part of everyone’s life, even if you manage to get hired at Apple (and don’t bother to answer my request for comment). What matters is how we learn from them. I can only hope that future emoji designs will be anatomically correct.
The singular form of of confetti is “confetto.”
Found while reporting: Round boys were the best animal internet trend of 2018.
One thing that brought me joy this year was the Round Boys Twitter (and now Instagram) account. These accounts are run by the same college student named Noah Periord, and post only pictures of aesthetically pleasing round animals.
I know it sounds unbelievably silly, but I went ahead and investigated why this was the case. One of my editors pointed me in the direction of Ingrid Fetell Lee, a designer who focuses on what brings us instantaneous joy. A lot of what she’s found (and spoken about richly in her TED Talk) is that bright colors and round shapes—like polka dots or confetti—make us feel happy. One confetto on its own may be pleasing, but many are joyful.
Lee thinks that we may be able to feel some joy from looking at round animals for this reason, as well as a few others involving our evolutionary instincts to care for things that remind us of babies. Although we’d feel it most if we actually got to play with them in person, we get a bit of that feeling from seeing pictures or short videos (or gifs) of them too.
He snooze.
Stuff I learned from others:
There are literally hundreds of thousands of people applying for electric car license plates in China, who won’t be able to get them, from Elijah Wolfson, Akshat Rathi, and Echo Huang for Quartz membership.
Life expectancy can differ 20 years within a few miles of a city, from Daniel Wolfe and Dan Kopf for Quartz. Within DC, the life expectancy in Capitol Hill is 83 years at birth, and 63 years at birth just across the Anacostia river.
A double decker taco from Taco Bell helped ultramarathoner Camille Herron set a new record for the most miles run in a 24-hour race (162.9 to be precise), from Martin Fritz Huber for Outside Magazine.
Animal of the week: All those (likely) female reindeer who are gonna pull Santa’s sleigh.
Reader wisdom corner: Friend of the newsletter Aleka Gürel responded to last issue’s fact about birth control gel for men by musing, “having worked on research that touches the wild ways in which people use contraception incorrectly, I am certain that the typical use failure rate for the male hormonal gel will be substantially influenced by people applying it, ahem, not on their shoulders.” She also pointed me to some research that suggests that a lot of women don’t know how their hormonal birth control works, which could lead them to using it incorrectly, too. Health literacy matters!
Aleka and I would also like to remind everyone that the last day to sign up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act is TODAY.
That’s all for now. Stay curious, friend! <3
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