Mark Mauno

Tweeting 'stuff' I find interesting or want to later pursue in more detail.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The burner under a Chinese restaurant wok puts out 100,000 to 150,000 BTUs of heat. The strongest burner on your home stove tops out near 12,000. Some restaurant jet burners run past 200,000. Roughly ten times your kitchen, sometimes twenty.

At that heat an empty steel wok can climb past 800 degrees Fahrenheit, and food sears the instant it touches the metal. The Cantonese call the result wok hei, the breath of the wok, the smoky charred taste you can almost never pull off at home. It comes from a few things happening at once in seconds: the browning reaction that crusts a steak, the sugars in the sauce caramelizing, and tiny droplets of oil catching fire in the air as the cook throws everything around. One dish off the fire takes about ninety seconds.

That speed is also why a giant order lands in ten minutes. Nothing sits in an oven waiting. Every ingredient is washed, cut, and portioned before you ever call, so once the ticket prints the cook is assembling, not prepping. Each dish hits the flame, gets tossed together, and slides into the box still steaming.

The wok's whole design traces back to one problem: saving fuel. Wood and charcoal ran expensive across much of old China, and a thin round metal bowl dropped into the flame heats faster and wastes less than a flat pan sitting on top of one. Cooks chopped everything small, because more surface area meant less time over the fire, and they learned to work in fast bursts of high heat.

For most of Chinese history, stir-frying wasn't even the common way to cook. Boiling and steaming came first, partly because the oil stir-frying needs was costly. The technique took off in the late Ming dynasty, the 1500s and 1600s, when firewood near the growing cities got expensive enough that cooking fast and cheap really mattered. Less fuel burned per meal, and busy city trade rewarded the speed. A money-saving trick slowly became the signature of an entire cuisine.

Steel melts around 2,500 degrees, so the food never gets remotely close. But the instinct behind that tweet is right. The reason your takeout shows up in ten minutes, scorching, is a four-hundred-year-old fix for an energy problem, still roaring under a wok tonight.

[Curiosity @CuriosityonX]

🚨: Time doesn't exist everywhere and it might not exist forever, new theory indicates

[dr.zeynep 🩺 @zeynepgsaray]

Ünlü bir nörolog diyor ki:

Erken dönem demansın (bunamanın) ilk belirtisi unutkanlık değildir.

Herkes sanıyor ki demans önce hafıza kaybıyla başlar, ama gerçekte daha basit ve erken bir şeyle başlayabiliyor.

Bu işaret 45 yaş civarından itibaren fark edilebiliyor.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

How Finland solved homelessness

[🎞️ GeoExplorer / earthdecoded5]

[Álvaro J @jota_snchez]

A Krishnamurti quisieron convertirlo en el líder espiritual del mundo. Pero prefirió pasar 60 años dando charlas por todo el mundo.

En ellas explicaba por qué la gente nunca cambia de verdad. 6 razones por las que sigues estancado:

1. Creer que puedes cambiar poco a poco

[Cliff Pickover @pickover]

Mathematics.

As if you drift off to sleep tonight, remember that what feels like chaotic randomness in the prime numbers is, in the limit, governed by a simple, elegant law. We are one.

[Cliff Pickover @pickover]

Dream with me. Our place in the observable universe.

Laniakea is the large-scale structure centered around the Great Attractor that is home to the Milky Way and approximately 100,000 other nearby galaxies. Source: Andrew Z. Colvin, https://t.co/MmwSXxvzM5

[Merriam-Webster @MerriamWebster]

In the days of horse-drawn carriages, horses’ hooves often DASHED mud onto passengers in wet weather.

To block the mud, people installed wooden BOARDS up front.

They called them ‘dashboards.’

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Did you know?

No hurricane has ever crossed the equator, due to the Coriolis force.

[🎞️ Robert Rohde]

[Arquivo Curioso @arquivocurioso]

O que aquela foto de um Buraco Negro revela de verdade?

A primeira imagem do buraco negro da galáxia M87 parecia apenas um anel de fogo desfocado para a maioria das pessoas.

No entanto, os conceitos físicos envolvidos ali superam qualquer ficção científica, tanto que muita gente reclamou que o registro não lembrava o visual do filme Interestelar.

Para compreender o que está acontecendo naquela fotografia astronômica, você precisa entender estes 3 pontos:

1. Visão dupla do disco: A gravidade ali é tão violenta que distorce o tecido do espaço-tempo. Como resultado, a luz emitida pela parte de trás do buraco negro é desviada para cima e para baixo, permitindo que enxerguemos o topo e a base do disco de acreção simultaneamente.

2. A escuridão central é uma ilusão: Aquela bola preta no meio da imagem não delimita o Horizonte de Eventos real, sendo cerca de 2,6 vezes maior que ele. O que observamos ali é apenas a sombra projetada pelo buraco negro, formada porque a luz que passou perto demais acabou capturada.

3. Ângulo total em um único disparo: A distorção luminosa é tão intensa que o retrato capta, em tese, todas as faces do objeto cósmico ao mesmo tempo e de uma só perspectiva. Trata-se do efeito de lente gravitacional funcionando em sua potência máxima.

🎞️ curiosidadesindispensaveis/IG

[Science Simplified @Scivf4]

Scientists can now write and move microscopic magnetic whirlpools called skyrmions inside magnets that are just a few atoms thick. Each whirlpool acts as a data but, encoding information not through electric charge but through the quantum spin of individual electrons.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Scientists have identified specific gut bacteria that appear to trigger multiple sclerosis (MS).

In a groundbreaking study conducted at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, researchers examined 81 pairs of identical twins in which only one sibling had MS. This unique design allowed them to control for genetic and environmental factors, isolating the role of the microbiome.

The team found that two bacterial species, Eisenbergiella tayi and Lachnoclostridium, were significantly more abundant in the twins with MS. When these microbes were transferred into mouse models, they directly induced MS-like autoimmune symptoms, providing strong causal evidence.

This is the most precise identification of microbial triggers for MS to date and adds powerful support to the gut-brain axis in autoimmune disease. The discovery raises hope for new approaches to early detection, prevention, and treatment — potentially by targeting or modulating these specific bacteria before symptoms appear.

While human clinical trials are still needed, the findings represent a major step toward microbiome-based therapies for MS and other autoimmune conditions.

[Yoon, H., Gerdes, L. A., Beigel, F., Sun, Y., Kövilein, J., Wang, J., Kuhlmann, T., Flierl-Hecht, A., Haller, D., Hohlfeld, R., Baranzini, S. E., Wekerle, H., & Peters, A. (2025). Multiple sclerosis and gut microbiota: Lachnospiraceae from the ileum of MS twins trigger MS-like disease in germfree transgenic mice—An unbiased functional study. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(18), e2419689122. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2419689122]

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Polish prodigy Marcin Patrzalek responds to those claiming his music is fake.

Watch this tutorial breakdown: One guitar, zero fakes – mastering melody, bass, and percussion all at once.

[TasteAtlas @TasteAtlas]

In many of the world’s great culinary traditions, the definitive test of a cook’s skill is the quality of the caramelized crust left at the bottom of the vessel. In Spain, this layer is known as socarrat—derived from the Catalan verb socarrar, meaning "to scorch"—and it is the absolute hallmark of an authentic paella, concentrating the essential fats, saffron, and fond from the broth.

The appreciation for this texture is entirely universal. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, it is fiercely defended at the dinner table as arroz pegao or concolón. In Persian cuisine, it is elevated to an art form known as tahdig, while East Asian traditions celebrate it as guoba or nurungji, often serving the crispy residue as a distinct delicacy or snack.

What appears to the untrained eye as a culinary mishap is actually a deliberate masterpiece of heat control and the Maillard reaction, proving that across diverse cultures, the most coveted flavor always hides at the bottom of the pan.

Credits: @reverie.rest

[Pascal Bornet @pascal_bornet]

Someone took this challenge very seriously.

Programmers were asked to design the worst user experience imaginable, and apparently some of them approached it with the dedication of a Nobel Prize project.

The goal was to make software confusing, frustrating, and almost impossible to use.

Mission accomplished.

And that is exactly what makes it so entertaining, because by exaggerating everything wrong with bad design, these creations become a perfect parody of user experience gone horribly wrong.

The uncomfortable part is that after looking at a few of them, I started recognizing features from real workplace tools.

At some point, parody and enterprise software become difficult to tell apart.

Which workplace tool have you used that feels like it was designed for this challenge?

#Productivity #UserExperience #DigitalWorkplace #WorkplaceHumor

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

They don’t make commercials like this anymore

[Red Collie (Dr. Horace Drew) scientist/inventor @RedCollie1]

The reason why the speed of light is finite at "c", rather than "infinite", is because all subatomic particles are SPINNING (like a vortex) at speed "c".
With energy E = mv**2 = mc**2. Mass "m" tells the time-density of rotating spin waves.
When some of that energy is emitted as light, then its outward velocity will also be speed "c". Tangential release.
The spin motion is actually four-dimensional, but you don't need to know that, to understand this simple principle.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A mother octopus lays her eggs, then stops eating. She slowly starves to death while she guards them, and by the time they hatch, she's already gone. Her babies float off into the ocean and will never meet her.

An Oxford scientist named Tim Coulson thinks these animals could be the ones to take over after we're gone. He laid it out in a 2024 book, and the case holds up. An octopus has about 500 million brain cells, roughly the same as a dog. Two-thirds of them aren't even in its head. They're spread through the eight arms, so each arm can taste what it touches and move on its own. Octopuses open jars. They carry coconut shells across the seafloor to hide under later. They've squeezed out of sealed tanks in the dark and gotten away. No animal without a backbone comes close.

But being smart has never been enough to build a city. Everything humans built runs on one trick: each generation starts where the last one left off. A kid today learns in school what took people thousands of years to work out, and inherits all of it for free. An octopus inherits nothing. Its mother died before it hatched, so there's no one to copy and nothing left over from the octopus that came before.

So every octopus has to figure out the whole world by itself, starting from zero. And they're good at it, weirdly good. Then a year or two later they die and take everything they learned with them. Peter Godfrey-Smith, a philosopher who spent years diving with octopuses for his book Other Minds, points out that they pass almost nothing on to their young. The cleverest animal in the sea wipes its memory clean every generation and starts over.

Coulson said it could take hundreds of thousands of years, maybe millions, and he's right that the raw ability is already there. The brain is built, and the body can crack almost any puzzle you hand it. The only thing missing is a second generation that remembers the first.