Sunday Newsletter (No. 11): Fertility tracking, fermentation tech & is Facebook watching you?
Here’s my take on a few things in tech and science that have been happening recently:
Fertility tracking. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the growing femtech industry and the problems women face with the contraception options currently available. There are many period tracking apps on the market at the moment which women use to either avoid or attempt pregnancy. Last week, reproductive health researchers at University College London’s Institute for Women's Health published a pre-proof of their paper analysing 90 fertility apps. Their results suggest that many of these apps are unreliable, particularly if they don’t measure at least one fertility-awareness-based method (FABM). These are: oral basal-body temperature, changes in cervical fluid consistency and urinary luteinising hormone (uLH) levels. Looking at menstrual cycle dates alone, as many calendar apps on the market do, cannot be used to accurately identify when a woman is fertile. The paper suggests that only apps that measure at least one FABM should be allowed to be marketed as fertility tracking apps. There doesn’t appear to be much regulation in this space, so any period tracking app is able to claim to help women identify their fertile window and ovulation. It’s important for fertility apps to empower and educate women to be in control of their bodies. Both accuracy and transparency are key here: apps should make it clear what kind of data needs to be tracked for accurate predictions, and they should not display fertile windows if there is insufficient data.
Links:
Do fertility tracking apps offer women useful information about their fertile window? (Reproductive BioMedicine Online)
Fermentation technology. Now onto another one of my favourite topics: alternative proteins! I’ve written about this area a few times already over the past few months and I think companies producing plant-based meat substitutes and lab grown-meat will continue to grow substantially over the coming years. The technology behind many alternative protein products involves fermentation - yes, the same process that is used to make beer. The Good Food Institute recently published a report which described fermentation technologies as an important driver behind the growth of this industry. There are three main ways in which fermentation is used to make alternative proteins. The first is traditional fermentation, where micro-organisms are used to process plant ingredients to create new plant-derived products. For example, the fungus Rhizopus is used to ferment soybeans into tempeh. Second, there is biomass fermentation in which micro-organisms like microalgae and mycoprotein, which have a high protein content, are grown and processed to create new products. An example here is Quorn, which uses filamentous fungi as the foundation for their products. Finally, precision fermentation is used to create specific ingredients that go into the product, such as Impossible Food’s heme protein, which is used to mimic blood in the Impossible Burger. Fermentation technology allows the efficient, inexpensive creation of a variety of plant-based proteins. From my experience of trying alternative proteins, there is definitely room for improvement - it sounds like innovation in fermentation technology will help us get to a place where nutritious, enjoyable and sustainably produced plant-based proteins are the norm.
Alternative protein companies have raised a whopping $1.5 billion through July of this year (TechCrunch)
Fermentation: An introduction to a pillar of the alternative protein industry (The Good Food Institute)
Is Facebook watching you? Just when you thought the Black Mirror episode that we currently seem to be living through couldn’t get any creepier… is Instagram watching you through your phone’s camera? A lawsuit has been filed in San Francisco against Facebook claiming unauthorised use of the phone camera by the Instagram app. Facebook claims it was a bug which led to users receiving a notification that the Instagram was accessing the camera, when it in fact wasn’t. Facebook has previously been accused of listening to users via their phone’s microphone, displaying ads for things that people have never searched for but have talked about with their friends and family. The company has denied such claims. However, it seems that the reason they are not listening to you is not because it would be unethical, but simply because they don’t need to. They have more than enough data about you, people you know and strangers who are like you, that they can guess what’s on your mind, and what you might be talking about, before you even type it into Google. So, I’m not entirely convinced that Facebook is spying on you through your phone camera - they just don’t need to.
Facebook accused of watching Instagram users through cameras (Bloomberg)
Is Facebook spying on you? (Reply All)
This is a newsletter of a three things in tech and science that I've found interesting this week. It's a 5 minute read on a Sunday, in which I’m hoping you’ll learn something new.
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