Welcome to a new edition of Cool Facts Friday.

This cool fact is about a surprising new weight measure oxidative stress in your body.

Oxidative stress is basically another word for too many free radicals.

And it happens when there's too many sources of oxidation, too much inflammation,

and it overwhelms your cells built in antioxidant defenses.

And if that's left unchecked, oxidation will cause damage to your DNA.

It damages proteins in your body and other parts of your cells.

And measuring oxidative stress is one of the ways we can measure progression of a lot of chronic diseases.

Typically, researchers have to extract cells from your body to measure oxidative stress,

and then they send it to a lab. And that gives you interesting data,

but it doesn't tell you that much about what's happening when the cells are inside your body.

Now, researchers at the University of New South Wales took a look at that problem,

and they found a way to detect oxidation levels inside your body by adapting a standard fluorescent

microscope. And they found that with this new imaging technique, they can detect a change in

the color of your cells when there are free radicals present. Color acts like a thermometer for

oxidative stress. The fluorescent light captured the detailed colors of cells and tissues,

and the microscope decodes what those colors mean at a molecular level using artificial intelligence.

What does that mean for you? It means that real-time oxidation in your body is about to be something

you can measure without sticking a needle in yourself. And that's cool.

One of the most profound things that has shaped my sleep is breathing. There's a company called

Mute, and what Mute is is a nasal dilator that's made from really soft medical grade polymers.

And it holds your nasal airways open in a way that is not uncomfortable. It's actually totally fine.

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