Sable Systems International 🐭🐀🧝🏼‍♀️

Thoughts, visions & revisions from John Lighton PhD, president & CIO of Sable Systems International (=the world's most advanced metabolic measurement systems)

[Jason Shepherd @JasonSynaptic]

Love the message but right now the NIH is being destroyed. I’m sitting on a 3% scored grant on Alzheimer’s disease and still don’t know if it’s getting funded! @PattyMurray @SenatorCollins

[Sable Systems International 🐭🐀🧝🏼‍♀️ @SableSys]

@CharlesMBrenner A huge gain for both you & Finland, Charles. Congratulations! We're rooting for you 👊❤️

[Charles Brenner, PhD @CharlesMBrenner]

some news

https://t.co/VO0nzkPQHg

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

I've never been at a medical conference where the results have been greeted with a standing ovation

Tremendous breakthrough in pancreatic cancer treatment

Through science

Hard work, rigorous research, clinical trials.

Science

Not the quack pseudoscience of social media

[Sable Systems International 🐭🐀🧝🏼‍♀️ @SableSys]

@WKCosmo Good grief

[Sable Systems International 🐭🐀🧝🏼‍♀️ @SableSys]

@DrPhiltill Can confirm

[Sable Systems International 🐭🐀🧝🏼‍♀️ @SableSys]

@caloriesproper2 Apparently it's quite effective! https://t.co/MVF6RS1gwg

[Dr. Catharine Young @DrCatharineY]

Never in modern American history have we seen this level of politicization of science.

Federal research grants may now need to “demonstrably advance the President’s policy priorities.” Peer review will take a back seat to political approval.

Scientists cannot remain silent.

[Silvi Rouskin @silvirouskin]

A very small subset of what immigrants have done for the USA : Albert Einstein (Germany) — His physics theories led to nuclear energy and the atomic bomb, ensuring US military dominance in WWII and beyond.Enrico Fermi (Italy) — Built the first nuclear reactor. Without him, the US doesn't get the bomb before anyone else. John von Neumann (Hungary) — Invented the basic architecture that every computer on earth still uses today, from your phone to supercomputers.Sergey Brin (Russia) — Co-founded Google. Came as a child refugee. Built the company that organizes the entire internet. Wernher von Braun (Germany) — Designed the rocket that put Americans on the moon. Jensen Huang (Taiwan) — Co-founded NVIDIA, the company whose chips power the entire AI revolution. Currently the most valuable company in the world.Andy Grove (Hungary) — Refugee who became CEO of Intel and made it the world's dominant chip company, powering the PC revolution.Albert Sabin (Poland) — Created the oral polio vaccine that wiped out one of the most feared diseases in history. Elon Musk (South Africa) — Built SpaceX, which now launches most US rockets including military and NASA missions, and Tesla, which forced the global auto industry toward electric vehicles.

[Sable Systems Int'l @SableSysInt]

Excited to see what data will come from Canada's first #infant #metabolic chamber! This cutting-edge equipment was designed in collaboration with scientists from the #Pediatric Health and Development Studies (PEADS) Lab at the University of New Brunswick.

https://t.co/2SEKXgVBGY

[Sable Systems International 🐭🐀🧝🏼‍♀️ @SableSys]

@WorldAndScience Gobabeb

[Sable Systems International 🐭🐀🧝🏼‍♀️ @SableSys]

@WKCosmo It looks as if it was designed by Jony Ives... wait... wut

[Sable Systems International 🐭🐀🧝🏼‍♀️ @SableSys]

@IterIntellectus The Jony Ives vibe (understated, inoffensive, quiet, elegant) just doesn't mesh with Ferrari (overstated, outrageous, loud, striking). That whirring sound? Enzo rotating at 10,000 rpm in his grave. But on the bright side, Ferrari out-rebrands Jaguar 🙄

[Sable Systems Int'l @SableSysInt]

How do #marine mammals balance #aerobic vs. #anaerobic #metabolism to optimize foraging during dives? With help from a Sable FlowKit Mass Flow Generator, scientists identified #metabolic tradeoffs in Steller sea lions.

https://t.co/rTZ2SUMxBd

#MarineMammal #SeaLion #Physiology

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Stanford psychologist spent 4 years proving that the simple act of walking generates 60% more creative ideas than sitting, and the experiment she designed to kill every alternative explanation is one of the most decisive findings in modern psychology.

Her name is Marily Oppezzo.

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

The result was almost too clean to publish.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves.

On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision.

She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

This is the part of the study that hit hardest when I read it the first time.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it.

Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes.

The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

The history of this is the part that should haunt anyone who still does meetings in chairs.

Charles Darwin built a gravel loop behind his house in Kent called the Sandwalk and walked it 3 times a day for the rest of his life. The theory of evolution was developed one lap at a time on that path.

Nietzsche walked up to 10 hours a day during the years he wrote his most important books and openly said the work was conceived on his feet.

Beethoven composed for the morning and walked for 5 hours every afternoon with a pencil in his pocket for when something landed.

Kahneman said the best thinking of his Nobel Prize-winning career happened on leisurely walks with Amos Tversky. Steve Jobs refused to take important conversations sitting down. He held them on foot.

Every one of them was using the system Oppezzo would not measure until 2014. They just did not know what to call it.

The question worth sitting with is the one almost nobody asks.

Every meeting you have ever attended sitting around a table was a meeting held at a fraction of the brain power that was actually available to the people in the room. Every brainstorm that got stuck inside a conference room. Every problem you tried to solve at a desk and gave up on. Every idea you could not quite get to.

The intervention is the easiest one in modern science. No supplement. No app. No subscription. No training program. Just a pair of legs and 15 minutes.

The Stanford lab proved it. The philosophers knew it. The neuroscience explains it.

And almost everyone reading this is still trying to think their way out of problems sitting completely still.

[Sable Systems International 🐭🐀🧝🏼‍♀️ @SableSys]

@DrNeilStone

[Lawrence Kazak @kazaklab]

Speaker Spotlight: Edward Chouchani @echouchani.
Join us for the 2nd annual @AdiposeBiology Conference in Montreal🇨🇦, Oct 7-9, 2026, to hear from this metabolism expert!
Register before the early bird deadline at: https://t.co/kbll9EWR9r
#ABC2026 @McGillGCI @DanaFarber

[Sable Systems Int'l @SableSysInt]

Are you going to #ADA2026 — the American #Diabetes Association Scientific Sessions 2026 (June 5-8, New Orleans, LA)? We'll be at booth #1432 & would love to chat with you about your research!

https://t.co/IkRXjYpbx8

#Conference #Metabolism #Physiology #Obesity

[Lawrence Kazak @kazaklab]

Don’t miss the @AdiposeBiology Conference in Montreal 🇨🇦 | Oct 7–9, 2026!

#Earlybird deadline approaching fast: June 1, 2026
🔗https://t.co/kbll9EWR9r

Join leading experts in adipose biology, #metabolism, #obesity, #diabetes, #thermogenesis, & #development
#ABC2026 @SableSys

[Lior Pachter @lpachter]

This person has published 71 papers in 143 days so far in 2026. That is, 2 days per paper (source: Google Scholar).

It's truly amazing. To see someone proud of this.