How to Survive Boiling Water

Spore forming bacterium are notoriously resistant to most ways of killing them. There's even a species that can resist radiation amounts that are 1000x the dose needed to kill a human.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinococcus_radiodurans

People interested in this: if you are ever in Amsterdam, I recommend to visit the Micropia museum: https://www.artis.nl/en/artis-micropia

Among many stunning things, they have a shelf full of foods and drinks (behind glasses) with age labels, ranging from days to years. It is fascinating to see how they evolve over time.

In case anyone else is curious about the current status:

> The Milk was declared missing on August 20th, 2022.

> The dorm’s extended mailing list of over 300 current students, alumni, and other assorted Random-adjacent humans was contacted, twice.

> In the end, no Milk.

https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/guest-post-the-random-...

So under most brewing conditions a nonzero amount of this microbe survive, but that count is 3 orders of magnitude lower what might be termed a “therapeutic dose?”

What even is a good experimental design for probiotic tea? Brew -> agitate in hydrochloric acid & digestive enzymes for X minutes -> mix with billions of existing gut microbes (that may kill this microbe or out-compete it for resources) and incubate at body temperature -> count the number of new colonies of this particular microbe?

That was a fun read. The author has a really good storytelling style.

I dont understand why the cold brew test had fewer bacteria than the steeped teas. If the bacteria are shielded in spores, shouldnt it be expected that they have the same amount of bacteria?

A great read from the author. It reminded me of my previous life as a bioprocess engineer, where I led investigations into biologically contaminated batches in biotech. It was fun stuff and I still remember some of the best advice I received from an Executive Vice President to never underestimate a microbe.

On this subject, I once led an investigation in which Bacillus cereus somehow survived in situ media sterilisation for 30 minutes and >121.1°C, despite there being no cold spots. At the end we realised it was the bioburden load of a media component and water temperature used during compounding.

This almost throwaway line from the article struck me as an example of what we can do with technology, if we choose to put our billions of dollars towards it: "I downloaded the BC30 genome".

Learning that MIT has an ancient bottle of rotting milk reminded me of my 9th grade science teacher. He had been teaching for decades and had a tremendously messy little office attached to his classroom. The pièce de résistance of his menagerie of scientific oddities was a large fish tank filled with many strata of mottled goos. I asked what it was and he said it used to be an ordinary aquarium, filled with fish and water, and he just left it alone for 20 years.

Another organism that survives pasteurization is paratuberculosis, in milk. It is commonly found in commercial dairy herds. In my opinion, this is alarming.

Many consider it to be a candidate for the cause of Crohn’s disease. Johne’s disease, which occurs in a subset of cattle infected by paratuberculosis, bears many similarities to Crohn’s disease.

When Crohn’s disease was first described, it was believed to be an intestinal tuberculosis, though tests seemed to counter this idea; to this day, it remains difficult to test humans for paratuberculosis infections.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07400...

[1] https://www.journalofdairyscience.org/article/S0022-0302(19)...

Cool story with an interesting ending (to me at least).

Just a tiny nit... Should "Brewed as directed for 4 minutes in boiling water." be "Brewed as directed for 4 minutes in boiled water." Was the tea sitting in water that was boiling or placed in water that just boiled? The later is how I brew my teas.

I boiled water today and survived.