Carolyn Christian Still

Live Oak Classical School — a founder, a teacher (since 2003); graduate of Baylor and SWBTS; married to Todd Still, Dean of Baylor’s Truett Seminary

[Carolyn Christian Still @CStill20]

@flemingrut Praying now that the nearness of the Lord be evident, surrounding you with mercies in these days. May your husband’s memory and testimony continue to be a blessing.

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

I'm a cardiologist. NPR reported this morning on something that could save more lives than any drug I've ever prescribed.

One blood test. One vial. Screening for 50 different cancers simultaneously.

It's called Galleri. And the FDA could approve it later this year.

Right now, we routinely screen for exactly five cancers in the United States — breast, colon, cervical, prostate, and lung. Each requires its own separate scan or exam. For the rest — pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, liver cancer, esophageal cancer, gastric cancer, and dozens more — we have no routine screening at all. We find them when symptoms appear. By then, most are Stage 3 or 4. By then, for many patients, it's too late.

Pancreatic cancer has a 12% five-year survival rate — because we almost always catch it late. Ovarian cancer: 50%. Liver cancer: 21%. These numbers aren't medical failures. They're detection failures. The treatments exist. We just find the disease after the window for those treatments has closed.

Galleri changes the math entirely.

Here's how it works. Every tumor — no matter where it is in your body — sheds tiny fragments of DNA into your bloodstream as cancer cells die and divide. These fragments carry specific methylation patterns — chemical signatures that are unique to cancer cells and different from the DNA your healthy cells release.
Galleri captures these fragments from a standard blood draw and reads their methylation patterns using next-generation sequencing and AI-driven analysis. The AI doesn't just detect whether cancer is present. It predicts where it's coming from — which organ, which tissue type — with over 90% accuracy in studies. One vial of blood tells your doctor: there's a cancer signal, and it's likely originating in your pancreas, or your lung, or your liver.

Your physician then orders targeted follow-up imaging to confirm or rule out the finding. Galleri isn't a diagnosis. It's a precision compass that tells your doctor exactly where to look.

The data is building fast.

GRAIL has now sold over 475,000 Galleri tests commercially under a special FDA designation. The NHS-Galleri trial — the largest randomized controlled trial of any multi-cancer detection test in history — enrolled over 142,000 people aged 50-77 in England. The primary endpoint — an overall reduction in late-stage cancers — was not met. But by the third year of annual screening, they found a 26% reduction in Stage IV cancers in key deadly types including pancreatic, liver, lung, and gastric. The test detected four times more cancers overall when added to standard screening — catching cancers that would otherwise have been found late or not at all.

The U.S. Pathfinder 2 study — 25,490 participants — showed similar positive signals and forms the basis of the FDA submission filed in January 2026.
Congress has already acted. The Nancy Gardner Sewell Medicare Multi-Cancer Early Detection Screening Coverage Act passed in February. If the FDA approves Galleri, Medicare will begin covering one test per year starting in 2028.

The current retail price is $950. Exact Sciences' competing test Cancerguard is $659. These prices will fall dramatically once FDA approval triggers insurance coverage and competition scales.

As a cardiologist, let me tell you why this matters far beyond oncology.

Cancer is now the number one killer of Americans over 50. Not heart disease. Cancer. And the patients I lose to cancer are often the same patients whose hearts I saved — patients who survived their cardiac event, optimized their metabolic health, and then received a late-stage cancer diagnosis that nobody screened for because no screening tool existed.

I've written on this platform about GLP-1 drugs reducing cancer metastasis by up to 50%. About personalized mRNA cancer vaccines cutting recurrence by 49%. About inflammation as the common root of heart disease and cancer. About AI detecting disease years before symptoms.

Galleri is the missing piece that connects all of it.
Detect the cancer early — with a blood test. Confirm it with AI-enhanced imaging. Treat it with personalized mRNA vaccines, targeted therapy, and GLP-1 drugs that may slow progression. Monitor response with liquid biopsy in real time.

That's not five separate breakthroughs. That's one integrated system of cancer prevention and treatment that didn't exist five years ago — and could be standard of care within five more.

The shift from reactive to proactive medicine — from "we found it too late" to "we caught it in time" — has been the central theme of everything I've written on this platform. Preventive cardiology. Advanced lipid testing. Inflammation detection. AI imaging. Gene editing.

Galleri applies the same principle to cancer. And it could save more lives than all of them combined.

One blood test. Fifty cancers. FDA decision expected this year.

Prevention is the new cure. And the science just took its biggest step yet.

https://t.co/2crrETWhRa

[Makoto Fujimura @iamfujimura]

In a lot of Vincent’s paintings, he embeds himself in the painting. In this iris, there is one broken stem. He turns a ordinary bouquet into a self-portrait. @iamculturecare

[Martina Navratilova @Martina]

Insanely amazing

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

“You can never think your way to a good life, you have to live it, and virtues will be formed by habit.”

Ben Sasse, facing a terminal diagnosis, offers five life habits at St. John’s College Santa Fe commencement.

[Erik Rostad (Books of Titans) @booksoftitans]

I've been to bookstores all over the world, and as far as I can tell, what we've done at Landmark Booksellers in Franklin, TN with The Great Wall, presenting the Great Books in chronological order, is something no other store is doing. Anyone know of another?

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Japanese immunologist spent 20 years proving that the chemicals trees release into the air walk into your bloodstream, hunt down your stress hormones, and arm your immune system in ways no therapist or pharmaceutical has ever matched, and most of the data has been sitting in Japanese medical journals for two decades waiting to be translated.

His name is Qing Li.

He is a clinical professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo and the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine. The Japanese government has been funding his research since 2004, and the body of work he has produced is the reason forest bathing is now an officially prescribed clinical therapy in Japan and Korea.

The story actually starts in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries coined the term shinrin-yoku to describe the practice of slow, mindful walking in a forest. They did it for a practical reason.

Japan was urbanizing fast, stress-related illness was climbing, and the country had thousands of square kilometers of forest sitting unused. The idea was to give people a reason to walk into the trees... They had no idea what was actually happening to the human body during those walks until Qing Li ran the first proper experiment in 2005.

He took twelve healthy adult men on a three-day, two-night trip to a forest park. They walked for a few hours each day. Nothing strenuous. No prescribed routes or breathing exercises. They simply walked slowly through the trees, breathing the air, looking at the forest.

Li drew blood and urine samples before the trip, on the second day, on the third day, on day seven after returning home, and again on day thirty.

The numbers that came back from the lab were not what anyone expected.

The activity of a specific type of immune cell called the natural killer cell, which is the cell your body uses to hunt down cancer cells and virus-infected cells before they can spread, had jumped by roughly 50 percent during the forest trip. The actual number of natural killer cells circulating in the bloodstream had increased significantly.

Three different anti-cancer proteins that those cells produce, called perforin, granzymes, and granulysin, had all risen sharply. And the effect did not disappear when the men went home. The immune boost was still measurable on day seven and was still partially present on day thirty.

Two hours a day in a forest had upgraded the immune system for a full month.

Li ran the same experiment with women a year later and found nearly identical results. Then he ran it with a control group who took a three-day trip through an urban area with the same amount of walking, the same hotel quality, and the same diet.

The urban group showed no measurable change in natural killer cell activity at all. The forest was doing the work, not the vacation.

The mechanism turned out to be a class of airborne molecules called phytoncides. Trees produce these compounds to defend themselves against insects, bacteria, and fungi. Pine, cedar, oak, and cypress trees release them in particularly large amounts, especially in warmer weather and after rainfall.

When you walk through a forest, you are inhaling those molecules into your lungs and absorbing them through your skin, and once inside your body they appear to directly stimulate the production and activity of the very immune cells Li was measuring in his lab.

Roughly 50 percent of the health benefit of a forest walk, according to Li's data, comes from the chemistry of the air itself. The other half comes from what the forest is doing to your nervous system.

This is where it stops being only about the immune system and starts being about stress.

A separate Japanese research team measured cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, in 84 participants across 35 different forest sites. They drew samples before and after a 30-minute walk in each forest and compared them to control walks in matched urban environments. The cortisol levels of the people who walked in the forest were lower than the cortisol levels of the people who walked in the city by a significant margin. Their heart rates were lower. Their blood pressure was lower.

The activity of their parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part responsible for rest and recovery, had gone up. The activity of their sympathetic nervous system, which is the part that drives fight or flight, had gone down.

Then a researcher at the University of Michigan named MaryCarol Hunter ran the cleanest version of this experiment ever done. She recruited participants from a city and told them to take a nature pill three times a week for eight weeks.

They were free to choose the time, the place, and the duration of the nature experience, as long as it was outside, in daylight, and free of phones, conversations, and aerobic exercise. They sent her saliva samples before and after each session so she could measure cortisol changes accurately and rule out the normal daily drop in stress hormones that happens to everyone.

The result was that participants experienced a 21.3 percent drop in cortisol per hour spent in nature, with the biggest payoff happening between minutes 20 and 30 of the walk.

After that, the cortisol kept dropping, but more slowly. The threshold dose for measurable stress relief was just 20 minutes outside in something that looked and felt like nature.

What none of this means is that nature is a substitute for therapy or for medication when someone genuinely needs them. Therapy treats different things than a walk does, and Li himself has been careful in interviews to call forest bathing a complementary intervention rather than a replacement for clinical care.

But what the research has settled is that the human body has a physiological response to being among trees that operates on the same biological systems modern medicine is trying to reach with drugs and clinical protocols, and that response is fast, measurable, and free.

The strangest part of Li's work is the implication he keeps repeating in interviews. The average person now spends more than 90 percent of their life indoors. Their cortisol stays elevated. Their natural killer cells stay sluggish.

Their parasympathetic nervous system rarely gets a chance to take over. The system that was tuned by millions of years of life under a canopy of trees is being asked to run permanently inside a box made of drywall and screens.

Your body has not forgotten what it is supposed to do in a forest. It is waiting for you to walk into one.

[Vive con Propósito. @PropositoyVida]

En China, dos profesores enseñan la electricidad estática de una forma divertida

[Jeremy Wayne Tate @JeremyTate41]

How?

In 1878 group of nuns in Santa Fe New Mexico prayed a novena to St. Joseph for a staircase.
A mysterious carpenter showed up alone, built a 33-step spiral staircase with no visible support, no nails, refused payment, and then disappeared.
Engineers are still baffled by it.

[La Sagrada Família @sagradafamilia]

We see the tower of Jesus Christ illuminated for the first time!
The light show, starting from the base up to the illumination of the cross, culminated with a composition of lights guided by drones that traced the figure of Gaudí and the phrase “first love, then technique”.

[Chad Bird @birdchadlouis]

In times of trouble, Jesus doesn't stand on the shore and shout, “Row a little harder!
Think positive! You got this!” He is not a life coach, personal trainer, or cheerleader on the sidelines of life. He is the Lord of the storms. He rules the wind and waves. He comes to us in our fear and hopelessness to say, “Take courage, it is I; do not be afraid.”

[Joni and Friends @JoniandFriends]

"Friend, nothing makes the powers of darkness flee faster than heartfelt worship." - Joni Eareckson Tada

https://t.co/jlldmIQqXy

[Carolyn Christian Still @CStill20]

Nick is on to something here. I have never once in 50+ years met a single woman in SBC circles who is trying to become a senior pastor. Not one.

[Nick Sandefur @nicksandefur]

Never had a female pastor, never will. Scripture is clear. But this whole thing feels overblown… Either the Credentials Comm. should be overwhelmed by cases or this is a manufactured crisis. Immoral men in the pulpit & deceitful men on X… Now that’s a problem #SBC26

[Historical Chronicles @HistoriaJack]

This is just incredible! Absolutely incredible.

[Carolyn Christian Still @CStill20]

@jackngraham I finally took time today to read the 5 pt series by the Houston Chronicle and SA Express-News, and this is no hoax, sir. https://t.co/gtYjni1ctb

[Courtney Mares @catholicourtney]

Speaking with Pope Leo XIV on the papal plane about JRR Tolkien and the Lord of the Rings after he quoted Gandalf in his first encyclical

[Dane Ortlund @daneortlund]

Chesterton: "The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild."

Off to church to let good things run wild!

[The Baptist Review @BaptistReview]

Dr. Ken Hemphill warns against adopting an amendment to our constitution that misunderstands the role of our confession and leaves questions about who is the final arbiter of "pastoral function."

https://t.co/xd9TTM1WuL

[Jessica Hooten Wilson @HootenWilson]

A classical ed teacher on LinkedIn just shared CS Lewis' response to plagiarism and it's brilliant. Let's use it with students to shun AI -->

[Nature Unedited @NatureUnedited]

At an aquarium in Japan, after closing time, some clever little otter pups help their grandpa tidy up their toys. As a reward, he gives them ice cubes