🥓 Bacon Without the Guilt Trip (or the Slaughter)

Remember when eating bacon required, you know, killing a pig? Well, Mission Barns just made that awkward by serving up bacon from a pig named Dawn who is very much alive and enjoying belly rubs at a New York sanctuary. Meanwhile, AI is speedrunning evolution to create proteins that would take nature millions of years to stumble upon, mushrooms are moonlighting as computer memory, a paralyzed gamer is fragging opponents with his thoughts, and a magician locked himself out of his own hand. Just another week in biotech where the line between "groundbreaking" and "what could possibly go wrong" gets blurrier by the day.

RESEARCH & NEWS

Picture this: You're munching on bacon while the pig it came from is living her best life at an animal sanctuary 3,000 miles away. Mission Barns just made this deeply weird scenario a reality, and Dawn the Yorkshire pig is apparently unbothered by the whole situation.

The San Francisco startup took a single harmless biopsy from Dawn's belly fat, grew those cells for about two weeks in bioreactors (basically fancy fish tanks with nutrients), and turned them into actual pork fat. Mix that with some plant protein, and you've got bacon that costs $13.99 for 8 meatballs at Berkley Bowl West. Dawn contributed once and could theoretically supply meat equivalent to millions of farm animals. She seems fine with this arrangement, mostly because she has no idea it's happening.

The tech works by feeding Dawn's fat cells plant-based nutrients in what the company calls "spongelike bioreactors" that give cells plenty of surface area to multiply. No genetic modification, no animal-derived growth factors, just cells doing what cells do best: making more of themselves. The FDA gave its blessing in March 2025, followed by USDA approval in July, making Mission Barns the first company in the world to commercially sell cultivated pork fat.

Here’s the sauce though: taste tests are... mixed. Company founder Eitan Fischer admits only about 50% of people prefer their products over conventional alternatives, down from an earlier claim of 90%. One journalist described it as tasting "great" but "a bit less meaty," which is either damning with faint praise or proof that we're not quite ready to break up with traditional bacon. Still, Dawn's living her truth, and that's what matters.

RESEARCH

Turns out evolution was taking the scenic route. Researchers at the Arc Institute and Stanford just trained an AI called Evo on 300 billion nucleotides from bacterial genomes, and it promptly started designing proteins nature never got around to inventing. These aren't just theoretical sequences, they synthesized and tested them in actual bacteria. They work. Some of them work really well.

The team, led by Brian Hie, created a database of 3.7 million putative protein-coding genes, then picked some interesting candidates to build for real. One protein they generated (called EvoT1) was so novel it would require stitching together fragments from over 40 different natural proteins to approximate it. It has basically no similarity to anything in any database anywhere. And yet it functions as a toxin with its own matching antitoxin, like nature's tiniest murder-suicide pact.

The really wild part? Of the proteins that Evo generated about 17% showed measurable activity. Five worked spectacularly well. It also designed 16 functioning bacteriophages from scratch by generating complete viral genomes, synthesizing them, and watching them replicate and kill bacteria. The first genome ever chemically synthesized was ΦX174 in 2003. This AI casually made 16 in one experiment.

This isn't AlphaFold predicting protein structures (though that's impressive too). This is designing genuinely novel biology by treating DNA like a language model treats text. The implications for drug discovery, antibiotics, and enzyme design are massive. The implications for biosafety are... we'll get to those later. Probably fine though. Probably.

RESEARCH

What do mushrooms, honey, and blood have in common? Apparently they all make decent computer memory, which raises more questions than it answers. Welcome to the delightfully weird world of biological memristors, where scientists are discovering that the future of computing might involve more trips to the farmer's market.

Researchers at Ohio State grew shiitake mushroom mycelium on wheat germ in a petri dish, applied some electrodes, and discovered it could switch electrical states up to 5,850 times per second with 90% accuracy. That's faster than you can blink. Meanwhile, engineers at Washington State University baked honey at 90°C for 9 hours, spread the resulting film on copper, and created a memristor that switches in 100 nanoseconds and completely dissolves in water when you're done with it (addressing the 62+ million tons, based on 2021 statistics alone, of e-waste we generate annually). And back in 2011, researchers in India demonstrated that human blood maintains electrical memory for about 5 minutes, which sounds like the opening pitch for a very weird cyborg startup.

For context: memristors are the "fourth fundamental circuit element" predicted in 1971 and first built by HP Labs in 2008. They're resistors that remember their electrical history, like tiny brain cells for circuits. The biological versions aren't going to replace silicon chips anytime soon (one researcher helpfully notes "mushroom GPUs are unlikely"), but they're biodegradable, sustainable, and radiation-resistant enough for aerospace applications.

The lead author on the mushroom paper admitted "it may smell kind of funny", which might be the most honest caveat in scientific literature. One IEEE commenter asked, "Blood and Honey. What is this, Winnie the Pooh?" Fair question. We're still processing this one ourselves.

NEWS

Rob Greiner is paralyzed from the shoulders down after a 2022 car accident. He's also playing Battlefield 6 by aiming with his brain while controlling movement with his mouth, which is either the coolest or most cyberpunk thing you'll read today. He received a Neuralink implant in June 2025 and posted gameplay footage in November showing him hunting targets in shooting range mode with decent accuracy.

The setup is really something out of a science fiction book: 1,024 electrodes threaded into his motor cortex pick up the neural signals for "imaginary mouse movement," while a QuadStick controller (operated by his mouth) handles character movement and shooting. Greiner describes it as having "an imaginary mouse controlled by thoughts" while his mouth runs the keyboard. It's a hybrid system that's essentially splitting his brain and mouth across different game controls, and somehow it works well enough for first-person shooter gameplay.

Greiner is Neuralink's sixth human trial participant, part of the PRIME Study testing brain-computer interfaces for paralysis patients. The coin-sized implant charges wirelessly and transmits via Bluetooth, letting patients control computers and phones through thought alone. Previous participants have played Civilization VI, Counter-Strike 2, and Mario Kart, though Greiner appears to be the first tackling the fast-paced coordination demands of modern FPS games.

To be fair, Greiner himself admits "it's gonna take a ton of practice, like a ton" because his aim is only as accurate as his cursor control. Early footage shows him missing quite a few shots. But the first FPS gaming session using brain implants happened five months after surgery, which feels both incredibly fast and slightly terrifying for what comes next. Competitive esports leagues might want to start writing their "no brain augmentation" clauses now.

NEWS

Zi Teng Wang is a magician and molecular biology grad student who had an RFID chip implanted between his thumb and index finger. First he programmed it for magic tricks (audience members tap their phone to his hand to trigger effects). Then he reprogrammed it to store his Bitcoin address, which he says "literally never came up" in conversation. Then he reprogrammed it again to link to an Imgur meme. Then he set a password to protect it. Then he forgot that password. Now he's locked out of his own hand.

The chip is password-protected with no "forgot password" option because it's a tiny piece of silicon sandwiched in biological tissue, not a cloud service with customer support. Wang's techie friends assessed the situation: the only recovery method is brute-forcing every possible password combination by strapping an RFID reader to his hand for days to weeks. Too many failed attempts could permanently brick the chip. His options are essentially "wait it out with hardware attached to your palm" or "minor surgery to dig it out."

The chip itself probably cost around $50-100 from companies like Dangerous Things that sell DIY biohacking kits. An estimated 50,000-100,000 people worldwide have RFID implants for everything from door access to payment systems to, apparently, storing memes. Wang joins the proud tradition started by Vice writer Daniel Oberhaus, who got drunk at Def Con 2017, implanted a chip, and forgot his password the next morning. Oberhaus spent 5 hours recovering access and his advice was simple: "Do it sober."

Wang seems remarkably chill about the whole situation. Quote: "I'm living my own cyberpunk dystopia life right now, locked out of technology inside my body, and it's my own damn fault." The Imgur link eventually started working again, so now he has a permanently embedded meme he can't change. Which is honestly the most 2025 problem imaginable.

So there you have it. Dawn the pig is living rent-free in upstate New York while her cells are being sold at Sprouts, AI is casually inventing proteins evolution forgot to mention, mushrooms are staging a hostile takeover of the semiconductor industry, brain implants are turning quadriplegics into competitive gamers, and somewhere in Missouri a magician is contemplating the irony of literally losing the password to himself.

Did the mushroom memristor story make you wonder if your next laptop will require watering? Ready to try cultivated bacon at $13.99 for 8 meatballs? Starting to think maybe biohacking your own hand requires more than a weekend project mentality? We want to hear from you.

Forward this to someone who still thinks biotech is boring. You're all as wonderfully unhinged about the future as we are and we’re happy to have you here for the ride.

Keep questioning everything (and backing up your passwords),

Prateek & Jere

P.S. If anyone needs us, we'll be taste-testing bacon while apologizing to Dawn and researching whether mushrooms accept venture capital.