Nisarg Bhatt

Physics, chess, table tennis

[J. J. Ellis @jjellisart]

I said this about AI well over a year ago. Using it to diagnose and fire people with medical conditions so they lose their insurance AND their income is somehow even more heartless and evil than I’d predicted.

[Deepak M Nadiger @deepakmnadiger]

Story time - I once took a japanese team to a plant in Pune. Auto comp. Jap team was looking to acquire. 1st meeting, 18 member team. 2 hours into meeting, one person pulls out plant layout - tells us, we are not designed for flooding risk, so he wants drain diagrams (1/n)

[Bastien Fachan @BastienFachan]

It's 9pm local time in London, everyone in the Royal Box has left the building, and the camera pans to the one person who stayed to watch the last match of the day...

Roger Federer, the winningest men's champion in Wimbledon history.

Cinema.

[Fan Commentary: Joe Rogan Recaps @JoeRoganRecaps]

Joe Rogan is disappointed in America after Tim Dillon exposes how Americans don’t care about their family and only care about themselves:

DILLON: “Family in America means nothing. Everything here is about the individual.”

ROGAN: “That’s unheard of in other countries.”

DILLON: “Me and my father aren’t on great terms. We haven’t spoke in a while, but my cousin is getting married and I want to be there for support.

My therapist tells me ‘You don’t have to go’.”

ROGAN: “😂😂😂”

DILLION: “Therapy in our country has become this way of enabling sick people to become selfish psychopaths.

They’re telling us f*ck it. It’s only your father who cares.”

ROGAN: “You’re right.”

DILLON: “Other countries are about family and culture. America is about you.

If you don’t agree with your sister then F*CK HER. If your mother disagrees with you then BLOCK HER. That’s what our country has become.”

[Paarug Sethi @paarugsethi]

all timer

[Prompter @PromptLLM]

Crazy take from Claude

[Nisarg Bhatt @foundnisarg]

@gandalf_thegreg Hahahaha

[Jayesh Waghmare @jayy_bandukkk]

AQI so low today due to early showers - could see Mumbai Skyline from Shivling point, Lonavala
#mumbairains

[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.

[Alex Rives @alexrives]

Together with UC Berkeley we are announcing the laser phase plate - a breakthrough in atomic resolution imaging. This is the brightest continuous wave laser in the world, 100 million times the intensity of the surface of the sun.

Phase contrast plays an important role in microscopy, but it was thought close to impossible for electron microscopy, where it would require interfering with an electron beam. Holger Mueller and Robert Glaeser proposed exactly this using a standing wave laser. It has taken over 15 years to make this a reality. Biohub partnered with UC Berkeley and Mueller to support this work and to engineer and build the technology.

Contrast has been the critical barrier to achieving atomic resolution imaging of the cell. In cryo-electron tomography, a cellular imaging technology that uses electron microscopy, the low contrast makes it impossible to resolve anything but the largest proteins within their cellular context. The laser phase plate removes that barrier.

With advances in AI this breakthrough in contrast will start to open up a new frontier in structural biology, that will allow us to see the molecular machines of the cell, and how they assemble into far more complex and dynamic systems, and understand how they work.

[antoine @antoine_os]

white pill for my nerds:

60fps e-ink display

a random guy outperformed entire eng teams by developing a pixel by pixel driver for e-ink displays that makes it 60fps.

he did that after work for months, launched it yesterday.

the future is bright

[Mo Shaikh 🇺🇸 @Moshaikh]

Citadel, is one of the most significant hedge funds, and they just dropped tokenomics …

And it’s not what you would have expected

[Aaron Li @aaronli]

claude fable 5 has solved CAD

I asked it to make a model of a V8 engine

It came back to me with a fully working model in under 10 minutes

[Abhishek B R @abhitwt]

Every company’s AI workflow rn be like 😭💀

[Nisarg Bhatt @foundnisarg]

@anishmoonka what was the age of the kids?

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Finnish scientists trucked in real forest dirt and grass and laid it over the gravel at four daycare yards. They let the kids dig around in it for a month. The blood tests came back with changes the researchers hadn’t expected to see so fast or so clear.

The study ran at ten daycares in two Finnish cities with 75 kids aged three to five. Four of the yards got the forest treatment: about a tennis court worth of soil and grass laid over the gravel, plus planters and peat blocks the kids could dig and climb on. Three others stuck with their normal gravel yards. The last three were daycares where the kids were already visiting real forests every day.

After one month, the variety of bacteria living on the kids’ skin shot up, and the kind that helps train the skin’s immune defenses jumped the most. Their gut bacteria started to look like the gut bacteria of the forest-visiting kids. Their blood showed more of the immune cells whose job is to keep the body from freaking out at harmless stuff like pollen and peanuts, and overall inflammation dropped. The kids on the plain gravel yards showed none of this.

Childhood asthma in the US doubled between 1980 and 1995. Food allergies in kids jumped 50 percent between 1997 and 2011, then jumped another 50 percent between 2007 and 2021. And peanut allergies in one-year-olds tripled between 2001 and 2017.

The Finnish researchers think one of the reasons is simple: kids today don’t get dirty enough. 37 percent of American preschoolers now spend an hour or less outside on a normal weekday. Their immune systems are getting trained in environments stripped of the bacteria humans have always lived around.

Aki Sinkkonen, who led the study, put it in plain words: “It would be best if children could play in puddles and everyone could dig organic soil.” The Finnish government is now helping pay for daycares across the country to make the same changes.

[Heidi @blockchainchick]

The SpaceX IPO is the most brazen retail fleecing in modern market history.

NASDAQ has REWRITTEN the index rules specifically for this listing. The 10% minimum free float requirement: gone. The 3 to 12 month seasoning period before index inclusion: cut to 15 trading days. Companies with small floats can now be weighted at 3x their actual float.

Translation: every passive index fund, every 401k, every pension is about to be force-fed SPCX whether they want it or not.

And what exactly are they buying?

Class A shares carrying ONE vote each, while Musk holds 93.6% of the Class B super voting shares at TEN votes each. That gives him 85.1% of voting power on a 42% economic interest. He cannot be outvoted. He cannot be removed. CEO, CTO and board chairman simultaneously.

For reference: Zuckerberg controls 61% of Meta. Buffett 35% of Berkshire. Musk: 85.1%.

SpaceX is also claiming "controlled company" status, exempting it from needing a majority of independent directors. Shareholders waive the right to a jury trial. They waive the right to class actions. Mandatory arbitration only, courtesy of an SEC rule change pushed through on a party line vote last September.

$1.75 trillion valuation. $80 billion raise. Largest IPO in history.

The rules of the game were quietly rewritten so one man could extract maximum capital from retail while answering to no one.

[Anubhav @Anubhavhing]

What the Actual f*ck are these dudes on.

Someone just dropped Open Source Palantir on reddit named Osiris.

-Real-Time Tracking:

-10,000+ commercial, military and private aircraft live on a 3D globe

- 2,000+ satellites including ISS

- 1,400+ worldwide CCTV camera feeds

- Earthquakes, wildfires, nuclear facilities and severe weather

Built-In OSINT Tools (no installs needed):

Nmap port scanning from the browser

- DNS record lookup and enumeration

- WHOIS domain intelligence

- SSL/TLS certificate transparency

- BGP routing and ASN lookup

- Threat intelligence and IP reputation

All running on a 3D interactive globe with day/night cycle, 20+ live API feeds, and a SIGINT news aggregator.

[Tatum Turn Up @tatumturnup]

This is the greatest video I’ve ever seen. No notes. The lifeless clanker carcass just laying there. No crowd reaction, anything. Just Billie Jean. Until its lifeless shell is shamefully dragged off. Purely amazing.