Physician loves science & nature & hopes for better times here & in old country. Tweets are personal. Repost’s aren’t endorsements.Likes don’t imply concurrence
🌊🇮🇳 At first glance, it looks impossible.
A river on one side. The Arabian Sea on the other. And a highway running between them for miles.
This is Maravanthe Beach in Karnataka's Udupi district, one of the rarest coastal landscapes in India, where the Souparnika River flows parallel to the Arabian Sea, separated only by NH-66.
The crescent-shaped beaches, dramatic monsoon skies, coconut forests, and endless coastline make it one of the most spectacular road-trip routes in the country.
Have you ever driven on a road with a river on one side and an ocean on the other? 🚗🌊
#MaravantheBeach #Karnataka #Udupi #India #RoadTrip #Nature #Travel #DroneView #IncredibleIndia #Ocean #BeachLife #LandscapePhotography #Wanderlust #EarthPix #TravelIndia
China's own economic miracle just got declared broken, by one of the people who studies it closest.
Logan Wright of Rhodium Group titled his new book "Broken China." His argument, in his own words: "this credit-dependent, investment-driven growth model has basically come to an end." He says China built one of the largest credit expansions in a century, and now that system is running out of road.
Here's the scale. Between 2008 and 2016, Chinese banks added new lending equal to roughly a third of global GDP. Much of it went into projects that never generated enough return to pay the loans back. Property once made up 20-25% of GDP. New housing starts have fallen nearly 80% since the peak, sales are down more than 60%, and buyers no longer expect prices to rise.
Wright's conclusion matters because of what it challenges. Beijing's message to the world has been that its rise is unstoppable. He says that story doesn't hold anymore, that China now faces a genuinely more constrained future.
New strategic industries like EVs and robotics won't fix this either, he argues. They're capital-heavy, not job-heavy, and don't solve the deeper problem: Chinese households don't consume enough, and the fix (shifting taxes, writing down bad loans) is politically hard to do.
He also says the US now has more economic leverage over China than it has in years, not because of chip bans, but because China can't keep growing without selling into markets abroad.
Polyethylene contains approximately 46 megajoules of chemical energy per kilogram (about ten times the energy content of TNT by mass) stored stably in its carbon-hydrogen bonds rather than as explosive potential.
The Oak Ridge molten-salt process announced this week is essentially an engineered way to release that energy as liquid fuel rather than letting it sit in a landfill.
Banks verify identity over video KYC. Companies run first interviews over video. Insurers "verify" claims over video.
Every one of these systems was built on one unspoken assumption: if I can see and hear you live, you are human. That assumption is what took the hit today.
Future is going to be very very interesting :))
An audiologist put in a pair of AirPods Pro for the first time. She took them out after 30 seconds and said:
"These are hearing aids. Apple just doesn't call them that."
She's fitted hearing aids for 12 years. $3,000–$7,000 per pair. She told me:
"Your AirPods Pro have a clinical-grade hearing test built in. The same test I charge $200 for. It maps frequencies your ears miss and adjusts every sound that enters your ears in real time. Music. Podcasts. Phone calls. Everything. Personalized to YOUR hearing. Not default. Not generic. Yours."
"Your AirPods amplify human voices and lower background noise when you start talking. My $5,000 hearing aids do the same thing. Yours cost $249."
"Your AirPods track your head in 3D and place sound around you like a movie theater. My hearing aids can't do that. Yours can."
"Your AirPods measure environmental sound levels and warn you when noise around you is damaging your hearing. Most $5,000 hearing aids don't have this feature. Your $249 earbuds do."
"Your AirPods play clinical background sounds — white noise, rain, ocean — for tinnitus relief and focus. My patients pay $15/month for apps that do the same thing. Your AirPods do it free."
"Your AirPods have a Live Listen mode that turns your iPhone into a remote microphone. Place your phone on a table across a restaurant. Every word streams into your ears. I recommend $300 accessories for this. Your AirPods do it built in."
"Apple built a $5,000 hearing aid and priced it at $249. Then they marketed it as earbuds for music. 300 million people bought them. Almost nobody knows what they actually are."
Here are 10 AirPods Pro features most owners have never turned on:
🧵
@malpani Here in US, in case of official intransigence one can file a writ of Mandamus, which will ask a court to order a government entity to do its job. It doesn’t affect the direction of result.
Smit Machchhar is the name of the Indian captain of flydubai Flight 1073, who fought back after being stabbed & gravely injured in the cockpit.
He then managed to unlock the cockpit door, allowing Israeli passengers and the Emirati crew to intervene and save all 174 passengers.
My 2 cents from out here, if one keeps aside the cussed local mentality of projecting shortage or creating one to extract more during a period of high demand, the easiest answer would be to ascribe it supply & demand or a true price gouging. Here in US during festive seasons there are actual price cuts to entice consumers, which makes sense as the sunk costs are fixed any way , so any new cash flow is welcome.
This may be the most incredible detail of the entire story.
Reuters has reported that the pilot who was stabbed aboard FlyDubai Flight FZ 1073 manually released the lock on the cockpit door while he was lying on the floor.
That pilot’
When I stilled worked on biosecurity, I first learned about Debug, a Google project to reduce mosquito populations.
Results from their Singapore pilot are now out.
They crushed mosquito populations, reducing dengue infections by 70% in the process:
DRASTIC has most of the locations and data on BSL3 & BSL4 labs worldwide.
We are moving forward with mapping research networks and pathogens studied.
How we created the map:
https://t.co/lik6fsUjG0
Direct google map link here:
https://t.co/o5fnJBiGAr
@TylerAStepke
@saranstm Who can forget the months of waiting even after the preferential allotment of Bajaj Chetak against US dollars. The evil socialist License Raj!
@VijayachandraK@KiranKS Tulu & Konkani do not have a script of their own & use mostly Kannada or Devanagari script depending on their location!
10 minutes of TikTok was enough to impair people’s ability to remember and carry out intentions.
Twitter and YouTube didn’t show the same decline.
Rapid context-switching may be where most of cognitive cost is.
As one whose knowledge has gone rusty from being away from old 🏠 I can tell you to start by memorizing common nouns & verbs & starting using them in conjunction with English or Hindi depending on the context. BTW N. Karnataka dialects are easier to learn but then folks in B’lore will have trouble following!
Wonder how good is AI at detecting misplaced humor & sarcasm, because even a 2-3 year old can get it. There’s is clip on YouTube, where an older brother reports to Dad in lally speech that his baby brother has blood on his face, which is actually ketchup which makes the dad crack up, making the big brother real mad at dad for showing an inappropriate sense of humor!
🚨 Scientists have engineered a common probiotic to act as a cancer-seeking 'drug factory,' completely eradicating 43% of colorectal tumors in preclinical trials.
The study, led by researchers at Columbia University, utilized a modified strain of Escherichia coli Nissle 1917, a safe gut microbe.
Because tumors provide an oxygen-low, nutrient-rich environment where the immune system is suppressed, the injected bacteria naturally migrate to and multiply inside the cancerous cells.
Once established, these engineered microbes act as tiny localized drug factories, converting a separately administered, non-toxic compound into a potent chemotherapy drug directly at the tumor site, minimizing damage to surrounding healthy tissue.
To maximize effectiveness, the probiotic was also engineered to deliver a powerful dual-action immune boost. It releases an immune-stimulating protein to recruit the body's natural defenses, alongside a specialized nanobody that unmasks cancer cells, preventing them from hiding from the immune system.
This 'triple-whammy' therapy—combining localized chemo, immune stimulation, and immune checkpoint blockade—completely eliminated established colorectal tumors in 43% of treated cases in preclinical trials.
By proving that living medicines can reprogram tumor microenvironments, this breakthrough offers a promising, highly precise alternative to conventional, high-toxicity treatments.
source: Yang, Z., Im, J., Chen, N., Mariuzza, D. L., de los Santos-Alexis, K., Li, F., Ballister, E. R., Ringham, O. R., Danino, T., & Arpaia, N. (2026). Engineered probiotics for tumor-targeted combination chemoimmunotherapy. Science Translational Medicine, 18(867), eady2289.
You genuinely have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.
There's a documented case of a 7-year-old girl with 82 warts, present for over a year and unresponsive to every standard dermatological treatment.
As a last resort, hypnosis was used.
Under hypnosis, she was told the facial warts would clear before the ones on her body. Two weeks later, 8 of her 16 facial warts were gone, with no change anywhere else. After three more sessions, all 82 had vanished.
And cases like this are more common than you would think.