Man-Made Horrors: November 2025 - The cloning vat edition

Man-Made Horrors for Your Pleasure!

We're pleased to announce that we’ve found an effective format for a secondary video, for those of you who have been following this newsletter over the past year, you’ll be familiar with our quest to bring you guys more content. It’s been a struggle to come up with something that we could actually deliver without it becoming an additional un-sustainable project. Science is hard guys, and to try and deliver more than one functional horror per month has been a non-starter. As we mentioned last month the algorithm’s been particularly tough on many creators over the summer, with everything from AI changing viewer's age and restricting their accounts, to massive bot purges (We’re glad bots are removed, but that’s still a source of revenue lost), and so increasing our output of content has become an imperative. But we’re us and we really can’t stand lowering our standards on quality.

We first tried filming more small experiments or proofs of concepts, but inevitably these would end up taking longer than expected and developed into their own full size videos. We also tried to increase the shorts output, and that has had a mixed result, the short’s algorithm is even more fickle than it is for the long format videos. We then began discussing internally on starting a podcast and this is starting to firm up, but it takes time and is an adjacent but different pipeline from our traditional process, and so it’s taking a bit of time to set up. Our latest video on cloning started as an ideation session on where we could next take the harvesting of cells from grocery store meat. Thanks to our faithful viewers, we’ve received some cell harvesting protocols to try and get the live cells we saw in the “Is meat dead?” video to separate and propagate. So it’s because of you all that we’re able to bring forth the man-made horrors! 

But I digress, the secondary video will be what we’re internally calling “explainers”, the research into the projects we’re planning, or covering a subject of interest we’ve had and feel like sharing. This will allow us to remove the uncertainty involved in builds and science projects while still bringing you thought provoking content. And the biggest benefit of this format is that it doesn’t slow down any of our projects.

From the Cutting Room Floor

So here’s a bit of backstory on where the cloning video came from. Justin’s always been obsessed with vat grown clones, it’s his prerogative as a mad scientist, but following our attempts at harvesting live cells from grocery store meat we started to entertain some more fantastical ideas. As posed in the videos, is it more or less ethical to eat the same chicken your whole life? 

But, our minds wandered to such science fiction classics as Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park, where dinosaur DNA was filled in with frog DNA and incubated in large bird eggs. Probably would have been best for everyone to have used the bird DNA as they’re avian dinosaurs, but the point remains. How far off does the species of the egg have to be from the nucleus donor? Could we hatch a mouse from a chicken egg? Well interestingly, there has been some research into this and even human nuclei have been tested in non-human embryos. Turns out, the growth was hampered by chemical mechanisms not syncing with the expected growth, but, BUT this means that it can be fixed. It’s not a resounding no, but rather it’s more difficult than just switching a nucleus… So totally feasible?!! Now that’s something worth exploring!

In The Works

Follow up to the Tactical Thermite Hot-Dog Cooker will be split up into two videos, both tackling some neat science. This part of our efforts to produce more content, and as Justin’s mentioned on our Discord (a perk of our Patreon) we’ll be cutting up or project into more manageable bits, and that’ll allow us to go into deeper dives on aspects that may have been glossed over if we condensed the whole project into a single video. We’re also returning to the CT scanner project as we’re thinking of splitting it up into multiple smaller builds exploring the science behind the components. As for the bio projects, we’ve been testing some interesting dopants on insects and the results have been so impressive that we’ve continued the experiments to the limits. We’ve also been growing a lot of a cool bacteria that produces a very cool product which we’ve found an unfortunate use for.

Neat Finds

Butt-Breathing, from IgNobel to Reality?

Detecting cancers a decade before symptoms?

Monoclonal Antibodies to Prevent Malaria?