For years, I raised alarms about dangerous gain-of-function research being farmed out to foreign countries, and I was told it was a conspiracy theory. Now, declassified documents show that the U.S. funded over 120 biolabs across more than 30 countries. Some of this research was conducted overseas precisely because scientists knew it would face scrutiny on American soil.
I'm calling for a presidential commission of scientists to review all gain-of-function research going forward. We're going lab by lab and pathogen by pathogen until the American people know the full truth.
https://t.co/gtv6sZ7viR
A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.
Her name is Audrey van der Meer.
She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.
The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.
Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.
Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.
When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.
The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.
When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.
Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.
Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.
The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.
Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.
Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.
Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.
Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.
Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.
A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.
The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.
The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.
The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.
That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.
Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.
Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.
Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.
You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.
The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.
Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.
Beware the empathy exploit.
Empathy is good and right when thought through (deep), but can be deadly to civilization when simply stimulus-response (shallow).
For example, releasing a repeat violent offender may feel good at first (shallow empathy for the criminal), but it is wrong to do so when that person will go on to hurt or murder innocent victims, as there should be deep empathy for future victims.
The origin of covid is a nonpartisan issue. It has become obvious to those without a conflict of interest that the predominance of circumstantial evidence strongly points toward a lab incident, again this is nonpartisan. I understand some disagree, but there should be no disagreement that the US must now lead with diplomacy to establish enforceable international biosafety and biosecurity standards and regulations/safeguards - especially for dangerous dual use dGOF research.
BREAKING: Secretary Rubio fires back at reporter: "I cannot understand why anyone would think it's a good idea for Iran to ever have a nuclear weapon."
"Look what they're doing with the Strait right now. They're holding the whole world hostage."
"What do you think they would do if they had a nuclear weapon? They would hold the world hostage with that nuclear weapon. That's what they would do."
"I think the president's point is how anyone cannot see that as an unacceptable outcome and an unacceptable risk is beyond him. It's puzzling."
🚨 JUST IN: Ilhan Omar is flat out REFUSING to turn over documents to a Minnesota committee investigating the $250 MILLION Somali “Feeding Our Future” fraud
She is KNEE DEEP in this scandal, and DOJ needs to go after her HARD.
DO NOT let her get away with this!
It will take years for public-health officials to regain the trust they squandered during the #pandemic. Charges unveiled by DOJ this week against the adviser to Anthony #Fauci for obstructing investigations into the virus’s origins show why. #covid19 https://t.co/sZXvoEitPJ
The COVID cover-up goes all the way to the top. Fauci funded the Wuhan lab. Senior intelligence officials hid classified evidence from the president himself. Scientists were silenced. Millions paid the price.
The DOJ has until May 11th to prosecute Fauci before the statute of limitations runs out.
I am not letting this go. The American people deserve justice.
BREAKING: Former NJ mayoral candidate Henrilynn Ibezim (D) pleaded guilty to forging nearly 1,000 voter registration applications
The thing that never happens happened again!
The Somali FRAUD OPERATION in Minnesota is the single GREATEST THEFT of taxpayer dollars...in American history.
@nickshirleyy continues to uncover great fraud across the United States, so the FEDS can come in and take it down!
More exposes coming, stay tuned!
Anthony Fauci adviser indicted by Department of Justice
David Morens, 78, has been charged with conspiracy against the United States; destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in federal investigations; concealment, removal, or mutilation of records; and aiding and abetting.
https://t.co/KcRsn7GWkk
'This Is A Both Sides Issue,' Says Side That Shot President Trump, Assassinated Charlie Kirk, Tried To Assassinate Kavanaugh, Tried To Shoot Trump Again, Shot Steve Scalise, Firebombed Governor Shapiro, Tried To Shoot Trump A Third Time, (cont'd) https://t.co/xtK8yqxvzK
This story is circulating widely in the press, but there’s little mention of the NSF’s steady decline over the past 25 years and its diminishing focus on scientific merit.
A quick look at this board that was removed shows a group largely composed of bureacrats and activists - not exactly a lineup of leading scientists. If the concern is the health of the institution, that conversation should include how it got here in the first place.
This is a law professor at American University in DC claiming the attack on Trump at the press dinner last night was orchestrated, apparently for PR purposes.
Academics have some of the worst TDS imaginable.