Thomas H. Moller

Husband, Dad, Counselor, Advocate and Criminal Defense Lawyer. Nothing I say on Twitter is legal advice. Retweets are not necessarily endorsements.

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

I'm a cardiologist. Everyone is sharing this study as a skin story. They're burying the part that matters.
Scientists took the aorta of a 75-year-old donor, applied a single engineered enzyme, and stripped away more than 70% of the molecular damage — bringing it down to the levels you'd see in a 30-year-old artery.
Published five days ago in Nature Communications. Revel Pharmaceuticals, with Calico and the University of Colorado.
Here's what they erased.
Sugar reacts with proteins in your body the same way heat browns bread — slowly, over a lifetime. It leaves behind a residue called CML, the most abundant advanced glycation end product in aging tissue. It welds itself onto collagen and elastin in your skin, your eye lens, and your arterial walls.
Two things follow. Your arteries stiffen. And CML latches onto a receptor called RAGE, which drives chronic inflammation — the exact fire I've been writing about for months as the engine of heart disease.
Since the 1980s this damage was considered permanent. Your body has no enzyme to remove it. Every existing approach only slows new damage from forming. Nothing touched what was already there.
So they built an enzyme that doesn't exist in nature. They screened 45,000 protein structures, then ran five rounds of directed evolution across more than 500 million variants until they had CMLase — a molecular lawnmower that oxidizes the CML off the protein and restores the original, healthy lysine underneath.
Not patched. Reversed.
Over 70% cleared from elderly arterial tissue. Over 55% from elderly skin — below the levels found in 31-year-old skin. 45-78% in lens proteins. The CEO said they expected 20% and were floored.
Arterial stiffness drives systolic hypertension, heart failure, and stroke, and I have no drug that reverses it. I can slow the process. I cannot undo it. This paper says undoing it may be possible.
The caveats are real and I won't skip them. This was done on donated tissue in a dish, not in a living person. No functional data yet — we don't know if that artery got measurably more elastic. Delivering a large enzyme deep into human tissue is a hard, unsolved problem. Clinical trials are years away.
But something considered permanent for forty years just came off human tissue.
We spent a century learning to slow aging. Someone finally figured out how to erase it.
Thank you @theallinpod @friedberg @chamath @pesottas

[🇺🇸King David🇺🇸 IN @dac62864]

There is low… and there’s Blue Angels low.

[Thomas H. Moller @THMoller]

@richardblade Hello Richard!! I just want to say how grateful my wife and I are to have been to Hollywood Happy Hour and meet you and Larry "the duck". Thank you! (I was the random guy who first said "Hi" in the elevator. Next time I'll bring your book "World in My Eyes" to sign)

[Feel Good Animals 🐾 @FeelGoodAnimals]

I can watch this video all day 😍🐕

[Eric Hunley @hunleyeric]

🇺🇸 Happy Independence Day!

Before cable news, there were Saturday morning cartoons. "No More Kings" — Schoolhouse Rock's very first America Rock episode — taught a generation how we fired a king and built a free country.
Some lessons never get old. 🎆
#IndependenceDay #4thOfJuly

[Todd Spence @Todd_Spence]

In 1982, Robin Williams did a routine as the American Flag for the Norman Lear produced tv special "I Love Liberty" created to bridge political divides - and it's one of the greatest pieces you'll see 🇺🇸

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your 6-hour flight from LA to New York is about to become a 3-hour flight. And it's legal because engineers figured out how to bend sound.

Since 1973 it's been a federal crime for any passenger plane to fly faster than the speed of sound over American soil. That's why your cross-country flight takes the same 6 hours it took your parents in the 80s. Planes got safer and more efficient. They never got faster. The law made faster illegal.

The original reason was real. In the 60s the government flew supersonic jets over Oklahoma City 8 times a day for 6 months to test public reaction. The booms cracked plaster, broke windows, and generated nearly 10,000 complaints. So the FAA banned the speed itself.

Here's what changed. The speed of sound isn't constant. It shifts with air temperature, which shifts with altitude. Fly high enough and fast enough in the right conditions and the shockwave physically bends, curving back up into the sky before it reaches the ground. The boom still happens. It just never lands.

NASA measured what people underneath actually hear: a faint rumble about as loud as normal street noise. No crack. No broken windows.

So the FAA's new rule flips the logic. Instead of banning the speed, it caps the sound allowed to hit the ground. Stay quiet and you can fly as fast as the plane will go. Boom already proved the tech works in a real test flight last year.

The last time you could fly supersonic, a Concorde ticket cost about $12,000 round trip and only crossed the ocean. The next version flies over land, over your house, and you'll never hear it coming.

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: FAA moves to legalize civilian supersonic flights over U.S. land for the first time in 53 years.

[Benjamin Watson @BenjaminSWatson]

21 years of marriage.
Lord, you are so good.

[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.

[Terrible Maps @TerribleMaps]

Prevalence of colour blindness by country

[Nature is Amazing ☘️ @AMAZlNGNATURE]

A new study finds that pet parrots become more social after video calling other birds

The parrots start singing, playing and showing off toys after making new friends

[Buzz Patterson @BuzzPatterson]

This is hard, guys. Really hard! God Bless America! 💪🇺🇸

[Nature is Amazing ☘️ @AMAZlNGNATURE]

Gorilla seen contemplating life after dispute with mate

Kiyomasa, a western lowland gorilla at a zoo in Japan, was filmed sitting quietly and appearing deep in thought after a reported disagreement with his mate

[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

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video.

Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments.

The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times.

Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it.

Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone.

The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.

[Nature is Amazing ☘️ @AMAZlNGNATURE]

I feel like everyone should know about Goldcrests. They weigh just about 1/100th of a pound and look really grumpy all the time.

[N𝕖𝕙𝕕𝕦𝕞 @onlyCFrancisco]

Baby back to life, no panic no rush, a professional who is aware of his duties. Remarkable

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

Probably the greatest individual male athletic performance ever recorded.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Possibly the greatest single male athletic performance of all time