Brandon Luu, MD, highlights a randomized trial in which gargling with plain water three times daily reduced upper respiratory infections by about 36%. He describes it as one of the cheapest cold-prevention interventions.
Original post · 1 min read
One of the cheapest cold-prevention interventions I’ve seen:
Gargling with plain water 3x/day reduced upper respiratory infections by ~36% in a randomized trial.
Palmer Luckey says Anduril won the Wildfire XPRIZE for detecting and suppressing a wildfire within 10 minutes of ignition. He argues that even small gains could save the U.S. roughly $500 billion a year lost to wildfires.
Original post · 1 min read
Thanks, Peter! This is the beginning of the end for destructive wildfires. In a country that loses ~$500B every year to wildfires, even tiny gains make for huge savings, to say nothing of the incalculable value of lives and homes.
Peter H. Diamandis, MD @PeterDiamandisCongrats to
@PalmerLuckey and Anduril for winning the Wildfire XPRIZE - for detecting and suppressing a wildfire within 10 minutes of ignition!
Konstantin Saifoulline describes using Claude Opus 5.5 to build an interactive Raptor 3 rocket engine in the browser, letting users cut it open, follow oxygen and methane through turbopumps, and adjust throttle. He links to the airsup.ai demo.
Original post · 1 min read
Kids will grow up learning like this. It's insane.
Konstantin Saifoulline @konstantinsaifoI asked Claude Opus 5.5 to explain how a rocket engine works by building an interactive Raptor 3 you can take apart in your browser.
Cut it open, follow the oxygen and the methane through both turbopumps, then throttle it and watch the shock diamonds move.
airsup.ai/rocket-engine
Aakash Gupta explains that prolonged sitting stiffens the hip joint, forcing the lumbar spine to absorb rotation it is not built for, a mechanism he links to chronic back pain and the high US cost of back and neck pain. The post also cites tennis players' hip mobility work.
Original post · 2 min read
Your hip is a ball and socket built to rotate about 40 degrees. Each vertebra in your lower back can manage about 2. Most chronic back pain lives in that mismatch, and almost everyone treats the wrong joint.
Here's the mechanism. The average adult now sits 9 to 10 hours a day. Sitting keeps the hip parked in one position, so the capsule stiffens, the hip flexors shorten, and that 40 degrees of rotation quietly shrinks to 15 or 20.
But your body still needs the rotation. Every step you take, every time you twist to grab something or swing anything, that motion has to come from somewhere. So the demand moves one floor up, to lumbar vertebrae that were engineered for stability, and they start absorbing rotational load they were never built to handle. Physical therapists call this the joint-by-joint model. A mobile joint sits under a stable one, and when the mobile joint locks up, the stable one gets drafted into a job it's terrible at.
Which explains why stretching and massaging your sore back barely works. You're treating the overworked joint instead of the one that quit.
The scale of getting this wrong is wild. Low back pain is the leading cause of disability on earth, and the US spends about $134 billion a year on low back and neck pain. More than it spends on diabetes. More than heart disease.
Pro tennis players figured this out because their sport punishes stiff hips instantly. A forehand generates its power as rotation from the ground up through the hips, and a player whose hips can't rotate ends up asking his spine to. That's why the fittest athletes alive spend part of every day sitting on a mat holding positions for 30 seconds that look like they're doing nothing.
The part that hurts is usually just the part covering for a joint that stopped doing its job.
テニス6年生のインプレ日記 @fTR2JPf4s1MZOYj
David Sinclair links to a article asking whether GLP-1 drugs are longevity drugs, citing a new Nature study reporting that semaglutide extended lifespan in preclinical experiments.
Original post · 1 min read
lifespan.comSemaglutide and the Longevity QuestionThere has been plenty of chatter about whether GLP-1 drugs might be longevity drugs in disguise. A new study in Nature adds the most direct preclinical evidenceDavid Sinclair shares findings from a Journal of Physiology paper showing muscle fibre atrophy during aging and disuse is mainly associated with fewer myofibrils rather than smaller myofibrils. He quotes David Sabatini calling the paper important.
Original post · 1 min read
The paper shows that muscle fibre atrophy during both aging and disuse is mainly associated with a lower number of myofibrils, rather than a smaller size of the myofibrils 💪
David M. Sabatini @DMSabatini
