Noah Smith shares a post by Brandon Luu, MD, reporting that two weeks without phone internet improved sustained attention by an effect size comparable to about ten years of aging and reduced depression symptoms more than the average antidepressant effect.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
David 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.
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 💪
PepMariner announces molekul.io, a searchable website cataloging Russian and Soviet pharmaceutical research on peptides, actoprotectors, nootropics and obscure compounds. The author says the site is a work in progress and invites requests for additions.
Huberman Lab Clips shares a short video describing a 5 to 10 minute daily attention practice based on breath or a visual target, citing Wendy Suzuki's NYU lab research on focus and memory.
Doing this for 10 minutes a day will improve your focus:
- Sit or lie down, close your eyes and focus on your breathing for 5-10 min a day - Your attention will drift. Bring it back to the breath. That is the practice - Eyes-open version works too: hold a visual target, blink freely, return your attention to it over and over - Any time of day works, though late night disrupts sleep for some people - Miss a day, no big deal. Get right back to it the next day
Wendy Suzuki's lab at NYU: 10 min a day improves focus, memory and recall. Zero cost.
David Sinclair shares a paper arguing that death is increasingly preceded by long periods of decline marked by multimorbidity, which he calls slow dying. He argues that efforts should target the biology of aging rather than its symptoms.
"Death is now less often sudden and more often preceded by prolonged periods of decline characterized by multimorbidity. This ‘slow dying’ has profound implications"
Trackmind promotes a 17-page Stanford paper that it says sets out the Hidden Markov Model framework used by quant firms such as Jane Street and Two Sigma, released free. The post is an enthusiastic summary and quotes a separate thread on randomness and measurement.
they just compressed the entire hedge fund playbook into a 17-page pdf.
Stanford put out the complete Hidden Markov Model framework that quants at firms like Jane Street and Two Sigma are known to run, and released it for free.
the crazy part is this isn't some watered-down summary, it's the actual mechanics behind models these desks keep locked up internally.
most people assume this stuff never leaves institutional walls.
this one hands you the framework directly, no gatekeeping.
bookmark it and read before someone takes it down.
You Were Taught to Fear Randomness and Called It Bad Luck. The Real Thing Can Be Calculated. — Randomness is not the enemy of understanding. It is the last thing most people ever learn to measure, and once you can measure it, it stops being frightening and starts being useful. Almost everyone
Katie Mishra says she felt a significant rise in baseline happiness after starting vitamin D about six months ago and suggests people of Indian descent may be genetically deficient. She quotes a post citing a study linking high vitamin D to lower depression and panic.
and if you're of indian descent (me), you're likely genetically deficient
felt a significant change in baseline happiness after starting ~6 months ago. took years for the rebellious daughter (me) to admit @bloodcure was right
vitamin D crushes depression: in a landmark study with over 7000 middle aged adults, high levels of vitamin D were associated with 43% lower depression and 67% lower panic.
David Sinclair amplifies a post citing a 2019 JAMA study of nearly 7,000 adults, which found that a strong sense of purpose was associated with lower mortality independent of wealth, health, exercise and depression. The original post stresses purpose as daily actions that matter beyond oneself.
Having a reason to get up in the morning cuts your risk of dying by more than half. A 2019 JAMA study of nearly 7,000 adults found that people with the strongest sense of purpose had the lowest mortality, and the effect was independent of wealth, health, exercise, and depression.
Purpose does not mean ambition. It means feeling that your daily actions matter to something beyond yourself. A grandparent raising a garden. A retired teacher who tutors. A caregiver who shows up every morning. The research does not measure achievement. It measures the feeling that what you do connects to something.…
David Sinclair argues that metformin's anti-aging reputation rests mostly on evidence from people who already had diabetes. The post is a brief claim with no supporting data.
Neville Medhora shares a simple graphic, credited to Nicko Dumadaug, showing protein return on investment for different foods, and notes the same post included charts for carbs and other nutrients.
David Sinclair promotes an amino acid he calls his favorite, which he says is found in asteroids and tastes as sweet as sugar, citing his PhD research. He links to a new episode of his YouTube show.
A short post from physician Aniruddha Malpani says weight loss can come with vision loss, accompanied by a photo. The post offers no details or sourcing.
Oren Yomtov reports that a critical, subtle vulnerability was found by AI-augmented researchers and patched within an hour, with no known attack. He argues well-designed software can still hide such issues that demand deep security experience.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence reports an active npm supply chain attack that compromised maintainer accounts and published credential-stealing packages including keyv and servicetitan packages. The malware self-propagates by republishing infected package versions.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence is tracking active Mini Shai-Hulud npm supply chain attacks in which a threat actor compromised trusted maintainer accounts to distribute credential-stealing malware.
In this attack, a malicious preinstall hook launches an obfuscated dropper (setup.mjs) that downloads a Bun binary from GitHub and executes a credential-stealing payload, either Math_Symbol.js or Math_Init.js.
The payload is a Mini Shai-Hulud variant, a self-propagating npm supply-chain malware family. It harvests npm, GitHub, cloud and continuous integration (CI) credentials, exfiltrates collected secrets, and uses stolen publishing access to inject itself into package tarballs, increment their versions and republish the compromised releases.
Microsoft observed the same pattern across all affected packages, suggesting a single actor using multiple stolen tokens.
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint customers should act on these alerts: “Trojan:npm/MalBun.A”
Cardiologist Afshine Emrani writes that he has long recommended low-dose daily tadalafil for vascular benefits. He cites a recent study suggesting the drug may make it harder for cancer to spread, and promises a thread on mechanism, evidence and who should avoid it.
David Sinclair says he takes low-dose daily tadalafil for long-term organ health, particularly the brain, citing vascular dementia as a preventable cause of dementia. The post quotes a cardiologist thread on the drug's vascular benefits and a study suggesting it may slow cancer spread.
I take low-dose daily tadalafil for long-term organ health, especially the brain. Vascular dementia is the second most common and most preventable cause of dementia
A short video post claims scientists have confirmed that human fear of snakes is learned rather than innate. The post contains little detail beyond the claim and the attached media.
Carolyn Rockey recounts how Jo Nagai, as a second grader, worked with Georgetown entomologist Martha Weiss to show that trained swallowtail butterflies retained an aversion through metamorphosis and that their untrained offspring inherited it.
Jo Nagai was raising swallowtail butterflies at his home in Kobe, Japan, when he noticed something odd. The ones he had looked after as caterpillars seemed to recognize him. Wild butterflies fled. His didn't. He was in second grade. He wrote a four-page letter to Dr. Martha Weiss, an entomologist at Georgetown University who had studied whether moths could retain memories through metamorphosis. He asked if she could help him design a version of her experiment for butterflies. She said yes. Using a muscle therapy device, Jo trained caterpillars to associate the scent of lavender with a mild vibration. When the caterpillars became butterflies, 70 per cent of them still avoided the lavender. Their brains had been completely rebuilt during metamorphosis. The memory survived anyway. Then he bred them. The offspring, which had never been trained, also avoided lavender. So did their grandchildren. Without ever experiencing the vibration, two generations of butterflies inherited an aversion to a scent their grandmother had been taught to fear. Jo documented it all in a 33-page research paper and presented his findings at the International Congress of Entomology in Kobe in 2024. He was 10. A second grader wrote a letter to a Georgetown professor, and together they found evidence that butterflies can pass memories down through generations.
Matt Krisiloff announces that Conception has generated the first early human eggs derived from stem cells. He frames the result as a major step with real potential to redefine fertility, shared with a photo.
