Though Kirkpatrick does acknowledge that the science behind oregano oil’s alleged powers is a little weak, she doesn’t unequivocally deny that it could help alleviate cold symptoms — it’s an appropriately skeptical stance that I appreciate. There may be little scientific research into oregano oil’s anti-viral and anti-bacterial properties — it hasn’t gotten nearly the same amount of attention as, say, echinacea — but I could simply interpret this to mean that the scientific community simply hasn’t yet come around to its beneficial properties. I shill out an embarrassing amount of money on weird powders that supposedly make me hotter and tinctures that ease me into a pleasant fugue state, but in buying oregano oil, I’m accepting that my immune system will yet again fail me in the future.

In Chicago, for example, wind gusts of up to 24 miles per hours will generate a temperature with wind chill of minus 50 or 60 degrees Fahrenheit. The wind chill index was adopted by NWS in the 1970s and then updated in 2001 to reflect modern understandings of human body temperature. The temperature of the air is the same on both days, but gusts of wind strip heat away from the body, making a person physically colder than they would be on a less windy day.

In the latest IVG achievement from Saitou’s lab, Yamashiro led researchers in a study that used the technique to grow a very early stage version of a human egg — called an oogonia — from human stem cells derived from blood. To reach the point where a fertility technician can punch out a piece of skin and transform it into sperm or eggs, scientists need to understand every key step in how a person is made, from how early sex cells develop in an embryo to what happens during puberty about 13 years later — and shrink the complexity and timeline of that development into a petri dish. (Because it is difficult to get human fetal tissue, she is growing the human egg cells in fetal mouse ovaries.)