Dr. E M

Back to college as a 👨‍🎓 learning to discover the invisible enemies!

[Gaur Gopal Das @gaurgopald]

Most fathers don’t do anything unusual.

They simply do what fathers are meant to do.

They show up.

In the stands, at the dinner table, during difficult conversations, through failures, celebrations, worries, and dreams.

They may not always have the perfect words.They may not always get everything right.But their quiet presence often becomes the foundation on which a child builds confidence, courage, and security.

Sometimes, the greatest thing a father can do is simply be there.

And that is no small thing ❤️

Wishing all fathers and fatherly figures out there a very Happy Father’s Day. M

#FathersDay #ThankYouDad #UnsungHero #ForeverGrateful #Father #EnergizeYourMind #YouCanHaveItAll #LifesAmazingSecrets #TheWayOfTheMonk #Monkify #MonkifyYourLife

P.S. Father's Day isn't easy for everyone.

If this day brings up pain, loss, or difficult memories, your feelings are valid too.

Wishing you peace, healing, and kindness toward yourself today ❤️

[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.

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

An incredible bit of sports journalism by The Guardian here. A short summary of the playing style of all 48 World Cup nations and a short profile of all 1248 World Cup players. Bookmark and refer to the resources when watching the obscure matches: https://t.co/tdLGq8en0o

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A British kid became a chess master at 13, then a bestselling video game designer at 17, then a PhD neuroscientist at 33, then the CEO of the AI lab that won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

People called him unfocused for twenty years. He was running the most deliberate career plan in modern science.

His name is Demis Hassabis, and the thing almost nobody understood while he was doing it was that every single step was feeding the same underlying obsession.

Here is the thread that connects the whole career, and why it matters for how anyone should think about building toward a hard goal.

The chess came first. He was born in London in 1976 and started playing at age four. By eight, he was the London champion for his age group. By thirteen, he had an international master rating that put him in the top fifty players in the world under his age bracket. He was on a track that would have made him a professional player for the rest of his life.

He walked away.

The reason he gave later, in interview after interview, is the part most people miss. He said chess forced him to think constantly about thinking itself. Every move required him to simulate what his opponent was simulating about him. He became fascinated not with winning the game, but with the process the human brain was running in order to play it. He decided chess was too small a container for the real question he wanted to answer, which was how intelligence actually works.

The video games came next. He used the money he won from chess tournaments to buy a ZX Spectrum. He taught himself to code. By seventeen, he was a lead programmer on a game called Theme Park that sold millions of copies. He could have stayed in that industry and built a career as one of the top game designers in Britain.

He walked away from that too.

He went to Cambridge, did a double first in computer science, and then made the move that looked like the strangest pivot of his life. He enrolled in a PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London. He was thirty. His peers from Cambridge were already running companies. He went back to graduate school to study how the human hippocampus builds memories and imagines future scenarios.

His 2007 paper on the link between memory and imagination was named one of the top ten scientific breakthroughs of the year by Science magazine. But the paper was never the point. The point was that he had spent three decades quietly building the exact combination of skills nobody else in the world had put together.

Deep intuition for how intelligent agents behave in complex systems, from a lifetime of chess. Hands-on engineering fluency, from years of shipping commercial software. And a rigorous scientific understanding of how biological brains actually produce cognition, from a PhD in neuroscience.

In 2010, he used that combination to co-found DeepMind with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman. The mission statement he wrote was two sentences long and sounded absurd to most people who heard it. Solve intelligence. Then use it to solve everything else.

For the first six years, DeepMind worked almost entirely on games. Atari. StarCraft. Go. People outside the field could not understand why a lab that claimed to be building artificial general intelligence was spending hundreds of millions of dollars teaching computers to play Pong.

Hassabis kept explaining the reason in interviews and almost nobody was listening. Games were not the goal. Games were a controlled environment where you could iterate on general-purpose learning algorithms fast, measure their progress precisely, and prove to yourself that you had built something that could transfer between domains.

In 2016, AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, the world champion at Go, in a match that had been considered decades away. And the day after that match ended, Hassabis sat down with his team lead David Silver and asked what they should do next.

The answer was the thing he had been working toward his entire life.

They turned the same deep reinforcement learning approach at a problem biology had been stuck on for fifty years. Protein folding. Given an amino acid sequence, predict the three-dimensional shape the protein would fold into. Every drug discovery effort in the world depended on it. The best computational methods could only solve a small fraction of proteins. Experimental methods took years per structure and millions of dollars per protein.

AlphaFold2 was released in 2020. Within a year, it had predicted the structure of almost every protein known to science. Two hundred million structures. Made freely available to the entire research community. More than two million researchers from a hundred and ninety countries have used it since.

In October 2024, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that work.

The line almost nobody quotes from his speeches is the one that explains the whole career. He has said, many times, that he did not build AlphaFold to solve protein folding. He built AlphaFold to prove that the approach he had been developing for thirty years could actually work on a real scientific problem. Protein folding was the demonstration. AGI was always the goal.

The chess taught him how to think about adversarial systems. The games taught him how to ship software. The neuroscience taught him how the only existing example of general intelligence actually worked. DeepMind used all three to build a method that could transfer between domains the way the human brain does. And the moment the method was ready, he pointed it at the single most important unsolved problem he could find in a domain where a breakthrough would save millions of lives.

Most people looking at his career from the outside, at any point before 2016, would have called it scattered. A chess prodigy who gave up chess. A video game designer who walked away from a gaming career. A computer scientist who detoured through neuroscience. A startup founder who burned six years on board games.

From the inside, it was the most focused career in modern science. Every step was quietly answering the same question. How does intelligence actually work, and what would it take to build one that could solve problems humans have not been able to solve alone.

The people who change a field are almost never the ones who looked focused along the way.

They are the ones who were obsessed with a single question so deep and so long that the path they took to answer it looked like chaos from the outside and like a straight line from the inside.

And they almost never get credit for the plan until decades later, when the Nobel Committee calls.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

There's a physicist at Stanford named Safi Bahcall who modeled this exact principle and the math is wild.

He calls it "phase transitions in human networks." When you're stationary, your probability of a lucky event is limited to your existing surface area: the people you already know, the places you already go, the ideas you've already been exposed to. Your opportunity window is fixed.

When you move, your collision rate with new nodes in a network increases nonlinearly. Double your movement (new conversations, new cities, new projects) and your probability of a serendipitous encounter doesn't double. It roughly quadruples. Because each new node connects you to their entire network, not just to them.

Richard Wiseman ran a 10-year study at the University of Hertfordshire tracking self-described "lucky" and "unlucky" people. The single biggest differentiator wasn't IQ, education, or family money. Lucky people scored significantly higher on one trait: openness to experience. They talked to strangers more, varied their routines more, and said yes to invitations at nearly twice the rate.

The "unlucky" group followed the same routes, ate at the same restaurants, and talked to the same 5 people. Their networks were closed loops. No new inputs, no new collisions.

Luck isn't random. Luck is surface area. And surface area is a function of movement.

The lobster emoji is doing more work than most people realize. Lobsters grow by shedding their shell when it gets too tight. The growth requires a period of total vulnerability. No protection, no armor, soft body exposed to the ocean.

That's the cost of movement nobody posts about. You have to be uncomfortable first. The new shell only hardens after you've already moved.

[Temples of the World @KalaForTemples]

A famed temple in Tamil Nadu that breathes water into its very heart.
It is one of the Pancha Bhuta Sthalams, the shrine of Water.

The sanctum is partially submerged in water all year round, a living symbol of its element. It is also an Upadesa Sthalam where the goddess receives teaching from the Lord. And here, no Thiru-Kalyanam (divine marriage) is ever celebrated.

Any guesses? Read on.
1/3

[Dr. E M @drmenz]

@SimpleGovTN Maybe an official communication to Passport issuing authorities stating this prior intimation letter generated from the IFHRMS portal doesn’t require signature can be issued.

[Dr. E M @drmenz]

@SimpleGovTN And RPO certificates verification personnel demand for Signature and Seal of the employer even though the letter bears Kalanjiyam ID.

[Brunbitty @brunbitty]

Tonight it finally clicked for me.

Neo asks her the classic question:
“If you already know what I’m going to do… do I really have a choice?”

And she hits him with the line:
“You’ve already made the choice. You’re just here to understand why.”

For years I thought this meant “there’s no free will.” But that’s not it.

Here’s the real insight:

Free will doesn’t exist in the moment.

It exists in the identity that leads to the moment.

The actions you take right now?
They’re mostly automatic - shaped by your conditioning, experiences, fears, habits, and past.

But the person you’re becoming?
That’s where your freedom actually lives.

You don’t choose the moment.
You choose the man who will meet the moment.

Or put in another way:

Determinism writes the past.

Identity writes the future.

Because when your life isn’t where you want it to be, the answer isn’t “make better choices.” The answer is: become the version of yourself who makes better choices automatically.

That’s the real red pill.

[BNO News @BNOFeed]

6 years ago today: A man in Wuhan, China starts feeling ill, becoming the first confirmed case of COVID-19

[Strider @StriderEl]

In today’s age of digital noise, it’s comforting that an AR Rahman heartbreak song still begins with a piano.🫡

1. Tere Ishk Mein (Tere Ishk Mein)
2. Agar Tum Saath Ho (Tamasha)
3. Piya Milenge (Raanjhanaa)
4. Nahin Saamne (Taal)

[Dr. E M @drmenz]

I'm on the waitlist for @perplexity_ai's new agentic browser, Comet: https://t.co/2lXRuq4Vlb

[Dr. E M @drmenz]

@Ronycoder Python

[Rony @Ronycoder]

PYTHON is difficult to learn, but not anymore!

Introducing "The Ultimate Python ebook "PDF.

You will get:

• 74+ pages cheatsheet
• Save 100+ hours on research

And for 24 hrs, it's 100% FREE!

To get it, just:

1. Like & RT
2. Reply "Python"
3. Follow @Ronycoder [MUST]

[Mahalakshmi Muthukumaran @MahaLakshmis25]

பத்து பொருத்தமும் பக்காவா இருக்கே😁😅

[Dr. E M @drmenz]

@Maddoc_ Congratulations doc 🥳

[Karthik 🇮🇳 @beastoftraal]

Useful. Beware!

[Major Surendra Poonia @MajorPoonia]

Pullela Gopichand breaks down during an interview ….
Fully agree with him

[Satya Nadella @satyanadella]

A couple reflections on the quantum computing breakthrough we just announced...

Most of us grew up learning there are three main types of matter that matter: solid, liquid, and gas. Today, that changed.

After a nearly 20 year pursuit, we’ve created an entirely new state of matter, unlocked by a new class of materials, topoconductors, that enable a fundamental leap in computing.

It powers Majorana 1, the first quantum processing unit built on a topological core.

We believe this breakthrough will allow us to create a truly meaningful quantum computer not in decades, as some have predicted, but in years.

The qubits created with topoconductors are faster, more reliable, and smaller.

They are 1/100th of a millimeter, meaning we now have a clear path to a million-qubit processor.

Imagine a chip that can fit in the palm of your hand yet is capable of solving problems that even all the computers on Earth today combined could not!

Sometimes researchers have to work on things for decades to make progress possible.

It takes patience and persistence to have big impact in the world.

And I am glad we get the opportunity to do just that at Microsoft.

This is our focus: When productivity rises, economies grow faster, benefiting every sector and every corner of the globe.

It’s not about hyping tech; it’s about building technology that truly serves the world.