🚽 Your toilet might be smarter than you (and other signs science might have lost the plot)

So toilets just flushed and that is enough? Well, science looked at that and said "but what if it also diagnosed kidney disease?" This week we have a toilet tablet that changes color when you're sick, chocolate grown in bioreactors instead of rainforests, nylon made from plants instead of petroleum, 100 million mosquitoes released per week to save lives, and researchers testing whether humans can absorb oxygen through their intestines. The future is weird, folks.

NEWS

A designer recently won runner-up in the UK's James Dyson Award for making your toilet bowl the most passive-aggressive health monitor imaginable. Urify is a tablet that sits under your toilet rim, releases during flushing, and turns from pale yellow to blue if it detects elevated albumin in your urine - which is the earliest sign your kidneys are quietly failing.

Yidan Xu, fresh out of a joint master's program at Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, was inspired after her father's kidney disease went undiagnosed for a decade. And the science is there. Urinary albumin is the most reliable early biomarker for kidney damage, and the color-change chemistry uses the same dye-binding reagents (tetrabromophenol blue, bromocresol green) that have been proven in clinical urine test strips for decades.

Each tablet stays active for 3-5 days and costs the same as regular toilet cleaner. It's brilliant in theory - zero behavioral change required, unlike Healthy.io's FDA-cleared smartphone ACR test or Kohler's $599 Dekoda camera system that mounts inside your toilet.

Hold your horses though! It's not actually a product yet. This is an award-winning prototype with no clinical trials, no published accuracy data, no FDA approval, and probably 5-7 years away from your bathroom if it ever makes it there. Xu consulted with GPs and the London Kidney Network during development, but "consulted with" and "clinically validated by" are very different things.

To be fair, 800 million people worldwide have chronic kidney disease, and symptoms don't appear until 90% of kidney function is gone. Early albumin screening is genuinely important. But calling this a kidney disease detector oversimplifies things. It detects a marker that requires professional follow-up, not a diagnosis. Your toilet still can't write prescriptions.

RESEARCH & NEWS

Turns out you can grow chocolate in a lab, and it's good enough that Japan's largest chocolate company signed a 10-year deal for it. California Cultured isn't messing around with callus cells like everyone else. They figured out how to use somatic embryos that naturally produce the exact triglycerides (POP, POS, and SOS) that make real chocolate melt in your mouth at exactly 33.8°C.

This matters because cocoa futures broke all-time records in 2024 with prices up 180% in the year alone, climate change is destroying cacao farms, and one chocolate bar requires 1,700 liters of water plus deforestation and labor of children not even included. Traditional cacao takes 6-8 months from flower to harvest. California Cultured's bioreactors do it in 3-4 days.

The partnership with Pow.Bio moved production from lab flasks to industrial-scale precision-controlled bioreactors with AI-based process control at a 25,000 square foot facility in Alameda. Their first product - flavanol cocoa powder - launches Q2 or Q3 2026 after FDA's expected GRAS approval.

The company claims their product is less bitter, requires 10x less sugar, and is free from lead and cadmium. Meiji, one of Japan's oldest companies (founded 1916), apparently agrees. Their 10-year deal covers flavanol cocoa for chocolates, truffles, and wellness products in both US and Japanese markets.

Meanwhile, Celleste Bio just unveiled chocolate-grade cocoa butter and is backed by Mondelēz (the people who own Cadbury). The cell-cultured chocolate race is officially on, which is either the future of sustainable food or the plot of a really niche sci-fi novel.

NEWS

Geno has been around since 1998 doing something most people didn't think was possible: convincing engineered bacteria to eat corn syrup and excrete the building blocks of nylon. Not similar-to-nylon. Actual nylon-6 and nylon-6,6, chemically identical to the petroleum-based stuff, just with 46-90% less greenhouse gas emissions.

Lululemon was so convinced they made their first-ever equity investment in the company and now sells $78 men's shirts with 50% biologically sourced nylon content. Novo Holdings led a $118 million Series C because apparently Danish insulin money and Japanese trading conglomerates both think bio-nylon is the future - Sojitz Corporation just partnered up in October 2025 to accelerate commercialization.

But how does it actually work? Genetically modified E. coli ferment plant sugars to produce caprolactam (for nylon-6) or hexamethylenediamine (for nylon-6,6). Geno holds over 1,800 patents, won the EPA Presidential Green Chemistry Award three times, and the Kirkpatrick Award for "most noteworthy chemical engineering technology commercialized in the world."

Lets lift up the curtain though. For nylon specifically, they're still at demonstration scale, producing "several tons" for testing rather than the thousands of tons needed for commercial impact. Their Bio-BDO is fully commercial with 100,000 tons/year licensed capacity globally, proving they can scale when ready. Traditional nylon production emits 60 million tons of GHG per year, so there's a $10 billion market waiting if they can make bio-nylon cost-competitive with the petroleum version.

The October 2025 Sojitz deal suggests they're getting close. By 2026, they aim to scale production 50-fold with Aquafil to support global brand demand. Your yoga pants being made from sugar instead of oil is apparently happening whether you're ready or not.

RESEARCH & NEWS

Brazil just opened a facility that produces 5 billion mosquito eggs per year and releases them into cities on purpose, which sounds like a supervillain origin story but is actually one of the most scientifically validated public health interventions in recent memory.

The 3,500-square-meter facility in Curitiba breeds mosquitoes infected with Wolbachia bacteria - naturally occurring, completely harmless to humans, and devastatingly effective at blocking dengue, Zika, and chikungunya. When these mosquitoes breed with wild populations, they pass Wolbachia, to offspring, gradually replacing disease-transmitting mosquitoes with harmless ones. It's self-sustaining once established and requires no ongoing costs.

The evidence is absurdly robust. A gold-standard trial in Indonesia published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed 77% reduction in dengue incidence and 86% reduction in hospitalizations. Brazil's own data from Niterói is even better: during 2024's worst dengue outbreak on record (10+ million cases nationally, 6,297 deaths), the protected city had dengue rates 8.4 times lower than the national average. The WHO endorsed the method in 2021.

This isn't genetic modification or sterile insect technique. It's releasing both male and female mosquitoes carrying bacteria found naturally in 50-60% of insect species. Wolbachia prevalence remained ≥97% in Niterói mosquito populations 7-8 years after releases ended, confirming the self-sustaining nature.

The new factory's goal is protecting 140 million people across 40 municipalities within 10 years. For every R$1.00 invested, R$43.45 to R$549.13 is saved in medications and hospitalizations. Compare that to Singapore's method (sterile male releases requiring continuous reapplication) and this is the elegant solution - let evolution do the work, then sit back and collect your savings.

RESEARCH

Scientists just published Phase 1 human trial results confirming that humans can safely tolerate liquid in their rectum designed to deliver oxygen through intestinal mucosa, which is either groundbreaking emergency medicine or the most elaborate biohack of all time. And to think we got this before GTA VI…

Dr. Takanori Takebe's team at Cincinnati Children's and Institute of Science Tokyo tested 27 healthy males with non-oxygenated perfluorodecalin - a liquid that can dissolve up to 500 mL O₂/L, dramatically more than blood or water. The concept: deliver oxygen rectally via enema, let it diffuse through intestinal capillaries into bloodstream, provide supplemental oxygenation when lungs are failing.

All 27 participants survived with no serious adverse events, though 59% experienced mild abdominal discomfort and 7 couldn't retain the liquid for the full 60 minutes. Blood tests showed no systemic absorption of the perfluorodecalin. The maximum tolerable dose was about 1,000 mL.

Let’s get back on the ground now. This was strictly a safety trial using non-oxygenated liquid. They proved humans tolerate it, not that it actually works for oxygenation in humans. The previous animal studies were dramatically more compelling - 75% of hypoxic mice survived 50 minutes with intestinal liquid ventilation versus none without, and pigs showed measurable oxygen uptake independent of lung function. The research even won the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize for discovering "mammals can breathe through their anus."

The inspiration? The loach fish, a bottom-feeder that swallows air and absorbs oxygen through intestinal mucosa when water oxygen is low. Sea cucumbers do it too, because of course they do.

Potential applications include severe respiratory failure, ARDS, COVID-19 pneumonia, emergency ventilation when airways are blocked, and bridge therapy when ventilators are unavailable. The key phrase is "potential" - Phase 2 efficacy trials with actual oxygenated liquid in actual patients haven't started yet. We're years away from this being medically useful, though Dr. Caleb Kelly at Yale noted that "if EVA ultimately reaches the ICU, this work will be marked by historians as a key scientific contribution."

Meanwhile, headlines screaming "breathing through your butt" are technically premature but undeniably more fun than "Phase 1 safety assessment of intrarectal oxygen delivery systems."

Once again we were questioning our sanity a little writing these. Your toilet wants to be your doctor, your chocolate might never see a cacao farm, your athletic wear is secretly fermented sugar, Brazil is winning the war on dengue with 100 million mosquitoes per week, and humans joined the very exclusive club of mammals who can technically absorb oxygen through their intestines (membership also includes pigs, rats, mice, and the loach fish).

But honesty, all of it is super cool. None of this is fringe science after all. Award-winning design. WHO-endorsed public health. Lululemon equity investments. New England Journal of Medicine publications. This is just regular Thursday in 2025.

Did the toilet tablet make you reconsider your relationship with bathroom fixtures? Ready to invest in cell-cultured chocolate futures? Curious whether your intestinal oxygen absorption is above or below average? We read every email.

Forward this to someone who thinks science peaked at smartphones. We’re still surfing on the wave of so many of you coming back week after week, which likely means you're all wonderfully unhinged about biotech in exactly the right way (and we love that).

Keep questioning everything (especially your toilet's qualifications),
Prateek & Jere

P.S. If you're wondering whether the enteral ventilation researchers tested their own invention, the paper carefully notes all 27 participants were "healthy volunteers." Make of that what you will.