Weekly Dose of Optimism #172
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Therapeutic food
8 min read
The article discusses Zipline delivering RUTF to combat childhood malnutrition in Rwanda. Understanding what these therapeutic foods are, how they work scientifically, and their history in combating severe acute malnutrition would give readers deeper context on this intervention that has helped reduce malnutrition by 89%.
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101955 Bennu
14 min read
The article mentions NASA finding sugars including ribose and glucose in asteroid Bennu samples. Learning about Bennu itself—its near-Earth orbit, the OSIRIS-REx mission that collected samples, and why scientists chose this particular asteroid—provides essential context for understanding the significance of finding biological precursor molecules in space.
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Friday! I hope you didn’t miss us too much last week. We’re back.
December is one of the best months of the year. Holiday parties. Santa. A few final sprint weeks and then a few days to relax and plan the year ahead. And, of course, humans squeezing as much good progress into the last bit of 2025 as they can.
Let’s get to it.
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(1) Zipline Helps Reduce Severe Childhood Malnutrition 89% in Rwanda
Zipline co-founder Ryan Oksenhorn
Over the weekend, Zipline co-founder Ryan Oksenhorn tweeted that the company has seen all of its numbers going up and to the right except one… ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) for kids.
A couple of years ago, “Rwanda made eliminating childhood malnutrition a national priority, and with better logistics they succeeded almost immediately, reducing cases of severe malnutrition by up to 89%.” Zipline has to delivery fewer of the RUTFs used to fight malnutrition because it’s helped practically eliminate the issue in two years. In their place, Ryan said, Zipline is delivering more products like vaccines and supplements that help kids have a healthier childhood instead of simply surviving.
This is huge, that we’re at this point in civilization. For some reason, I clearly remember talking to somebody in line at Alpine Bagels in college about this idea: that all of these interventions that could help people in developing countries were actually cheap and simple, but that getting those cheap, simple solutions to people was the problem.
Now, we live in a world in which we can put those cheap, simple solutions in an autonomous drone that navigates itself to the remote areas in need. Just fly right over the challenge.
...This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.