A 17-year-old in Iowa boiled beets in her chemistry class and turned them into stitches that change color when your wound gets infected. Her name is Dasia Taylor. It started as a science fair project.
She wanted a low-tech version of the "smart stitches" Tufts researchers built in 2016. Those used thread wired up with sensors and a tiny chip that pinged your phone if something went wrong. Cool, but useless without a phone or a hospital that can afford it.
Her version doesn't need any of that. Healthy skin is slightly acidic, like lemon juice but much milder. When bacteria grow in a wound, the chemistry flips and turns more like soap or baking soda.
Beet juice has a quirk. The same red pigment that stains your fingers when you cook it shifts color based on what it touches. Bright red on healthy skin. Dark purple on infected skin. The switch lines up with infection almost exactly.
She tested ten threads before finding a cotton-polyester blend that soaked up the dye and changed color within five minutes. That was the prototype.
Around 1 in 40 American surgeries end in an infection at the cut, costing hospitals more than $3 billion a year. In poorer countries the rate is closer to 1 in 9. In parts of Africa it's 1 in 6. In some Ethiopian hospitals, up to a quarter of surgery patients leave with an infection.
The whole game is catching it early. Spot it in time and antibiotics handle it. Miss the window and the patient is back on the operating table.
Dasia filed a patent in 2021 and started a medical device company called VariegateHealth in 2022. The stitches haven't been tested on real patients yet. New medical device patents can take a decade. She's also looking into a side benefit: the beet pigment kills bugs like E. coli and Klebsiella in lab tests.
Smart stitches need a phone to read them. Hers just need eyes.
They do things like this because they consider white men and women as the standard for their governing rules, that is the very definition of institutional racism.
The Common Black College App allows you to apply to 67 HBCUs at once, and sometimes when applying individually application fees are waived by the university. For select colleges guidance counselors can provide fee waivers. Tell the youths!
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Carmelo Anthony has been at nearly every Syracuse home game to watch his son play 🍊🏀
Kiyan Anthony told me that Melo usually flies up the day of, and they get in a workout together pregame.
"It means a lot. He doesn't have to do that, he has a job with NBC...I feel like I play better every time he does that."
Trump sent $40 billion to Argentina, $12 billion to Israel (in just his second term) and is trying to increase the military budget to $1 trillion, despite the fact that the pentagon can’t account for 63% of their money and failed 8 audits in a row.