🦠️ Plastic Eating Bacteria and Anti-Herpes Bubblegum🍬

(What is this? An occasional newsletter that's 80% good news, 20% weird stuff, 100% interesting.)

What’s Good and New

🚣‍♀️ 💦A few European lakes (29 to be exact) have been found to have a type of 🦠️ bacteria that breaks down plastic pollution 🦠️. Incredible finding, but also concerning; the scientists wonder if the bacteria has adapted to eating up plastic because there was just so MUCH of it in the lakes ☹️ Scientists are now focusing on how we could leverage this bacteria in our bodies of water to better manage environmental pollution, and that’s a huge win. Can’t wait to hear an update on this initiative in a few years.

🍬Gum that can prevent HERPES?! 🦠️ Yep you heard that right. Precision Medicine Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Dental Medicine (wow that was a lot of capitalization) reports that they’ve developed a special type of chewing gum made of lablab beans 🥜 (love the name) that was effective at neutralizing both influenza and herpes simplex virus (HSV)!!! 🤔 This is such a weird and awesome discovery, and it raises so many questions. Who’s idea was it to prevent these viral diseases via chewing gum, and will this gum be promoted on apps like Hinge in the near future?  I smell a potential partnership happening… 🤝

🌴 Vacation-adjacent fun facts

Pilots and co-pilots never eat the same meal before a flight. This reduces the risk of food poisoning in BOTH pilots, which is an interesting thought. If one pilot gets the 💩 dookies 💩 because of what they ate prior to flying, at least the other can take over and save the day. Cool!

Contrary to the spiels of moms worldwide, you do not have to wait an hour after eating to swim safely. There actually isn’t any medical data that says it’s dangerous to swim on a full stomach. Sure it may feel uncomfortable since being immersed in water will lift your stuffed stomach organ up higher into your chest cavity (🤢), but it won’t kill you or anything. How did this mom rumour spread anyway? 

➡️ Jet lag is worse when traveling west to east. ➡️ Jet lag is generally worse when traveling eastward because our internal body clock, or circadian rhythm, naturally prefers slightly longer days (a cycle slightly longer than 24 hours). Moving eastward shortens the day and forces our bodies to adjust to a shorter cycle, which totally sucks and we totally feel it (similar to how we feel daylight savings time when we spring forward, losing an hour). Interesting, right? 🤓

🚫🥗 When traveling, avoid eating fresh fruit and vegetables unless you have washed them with drinkable water first 🚰 (and yes I’m talking about salads and other prepared produce at the all inclusive buffet). This will prevent any potential bugs from entering your system (bugs as in literal bugs 🪳 or bacteria 🦠️) and will prevent you from having a rotten time trying to hold in diarrhea in the hot sun while on a swaying catamaran floating 1000 feet away from the nearest resort bathroom. 💩💩💩

In the Community

🇨🇦 In local news (I’m in the Greater Toronto Area in case you missed that), a friend in the Mostly Good community (hi Rach! 👋) shared that her kids’ school, St. Sebastian in Mississauga, came up with a creative solution for school fundraising: a 🥣 cereal box domino track with TRIPLE the benefits - a fundraiser for the school, charity for a community food bank and FUN for the students. The premise was simple: students collected $5 pledges to sponsor a cereal box with the goal of creating a huge cereal box domino track that represents the chain reaction of kindness – how compassion can create a domino effect. The more money raised for the school, meant more cereal boxes added to the track, and more cereal donated to the local food bank. In the end, the school raised enough money for 1000 cereal boxes, and on May 9th they had a huge domino track event to celebrate the funds raised and huge donation! Check out their cool video here. What an awesome idea, way to go St. Sebastian!

Are you doing something Mostly Good in your community? Let me know what you’ve got going on! 😊

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