Turkeys, Thinking, and Talking: November

Read to see some learnings from the past month, some stuff I've done, and to (hopefully) gain some value recommendation-wise.

Hey!

I saw a turkey run the other day (I see them every where, it’s Boston!), and I thought to myself: Wow, that’s some fast food. Hehe.

Welcome back to my newsletter. Hope you had a festive November.

For those who don't know, I'm Nina Khera. You may have met me during a meeting, or at the latest networking event in Boston. I'm a 15-year-old human longevity researcher who's working on projects from topics spanning cellular senescence (zombie cells) to epidermolysis bullosa (skin disease)!

This month I’ve focused on Biotein, focused on school as per usual, went to a conference, and worked with Youth STEM Matters on a cool new training project for the organization.

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Biotein

This month, we focused on setting priorities while experiments are ongoing (we’ve gotten some good results so far) - as we don’t have wet-lab work to do. We’ve been working on content, customer research (figuring out our value prop to people), and product details!

Our overall main priority right now is market research, as that’ll really inform the core features we try to integrate into our product and the audience we’ll target the product at.

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Mindsets and Philosophy

Here are some thoughts I’ve been having!

• The more you stress about something, the worse it gets. I realized this (with the help of my dad!) about my sleep. I really was stressing about it a ton, but I didn’t realize a large perpetuating factor of the issues was my stress. Now, I don’t stress, and I sleep when I feel tired. Biiiig difference in how I feel day to day (it’s amazing!!!). If a problem happens a bit, you need to strike a good balance between nipping it in the bud immediately and being relaxed about it. You may begin to feel stressed about the problem (which sucks for sleep, because it’s a nightly thing!), but even if you fix the original causal factors at that point - that stress can (if it’s a physical/bodily thing or even a nerves thing) still perpetuate the problem. Large generalization - this doesn’t apply to everything, but does apply to quite a bit in my experience.

• Humans are bad at conceptualizing long-term stuff. I have no idea if I’ve talked about this on my newsletter before, but I’ve been thinking about how climate change and similar problems are perpetuated largely because we can’t conceptualize the severity of this problem. Although that’s an assumption based on the people I’m aware of + my research. Am I wrong? I’m not sure - but I’ve noticed this in other situations too.

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Emergent Ventures

I’ve gone to the Emergent Ventures grant winners Unconference this month! I met so many cool people there: economists, someone who’s building a cool new word game, someone who’s building small powerful satellites, Alexey Guzey, Nintil, etc! So amazing - we got to go to the Air and Space Museum in Virginia and have a ton of discussions around productivity, focus, etc!

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Knowledge Bytes

Here are some recommendations from the month!

- Funny website: okay, I’m pretty sure this is semi-well-known, but for all the other Gen Z - xkcd is hilarious. Thank you. Especially this one.

- Awesome blog: Alexey Guzey’s writing! Really interesting articles on life sciences and sleep.

- Delicious recommendation: This Tasty recipe. Delish. Although not all that health conscious, haha!

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Shoutouts

Here are some fun shoutouts:

• Mike Makowsky for an interesting conversation around how to give recommendations to users, and for really cool insights on how to make the world a better place at EV Unconference!

• 1517 (Zak) for some awesome help with what Biotein’s priorities should be during this wet-lab-focused time! It’s been really helpful to get guidance on market research and what’s important during this time from y’all.

• Joshua Reding for some good feedback on what Biotein should be doing right now + marketing costs within products!

• Gustavo for being an awesome collaborator + being awesome to work with! It’s been great to work with you.

Thank you to everyone reading this. Even if I didn't mention you this month. you probably helped me a lot. Thank you!

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Next Month

In December, I’ll be working on developing Biotein’s bio-age test, working on school, mid-year exams :(, coding, writing more for YSM, and more!

Reach out to me if you want to talk about human longevity (or just life sciences in general) or anything else honestly!

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nina-khera-115b5a175/

Personal Website: https://ninakhera.com/

Email: kheranina@gmail.com (or just reply to this email)