Girinath🔱🇮🇳

Researcher. Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

When India accidentally wiped out its vultures, half a million people died in five years.

The bird doing zoomies in this video runs the most extreme digestive system in the animal kingdom. Vulture stomach acid sits near pH 1, strong enough to destroy anthrax, rabies, and botulism in the carcasses they eat. A flock strips a cow to bone in about 45 minutes.

India had 50 million of them. Free sanitation at national scale, in a country where religious custom means most cattle die natural deaths and every dead cow becomes a carcass someone has to deal with.

Then the patent on diclofenac expired in 1994. Farmers started using the cheap painkiller on livestock. Trace amounts left in a carcass cause kidney failure in vultures. Within a decade, 50 million birds fell to a few thousand. The fastest collapse of any bird species since the passenger pigeon.

The carcasses didn't disappear. Feral dogs took the vultures' place and brought rabies with them. Rotting remains leached into waterways. In districts where vultures once thrived, human death rates rose more than 4 percent. Economists at Chicago and Warwick put the toll at 100,000 extra deaths a year and $69 billion in annual damages.

So yes, the goofy bird sprinting down the walkway is adorable. It's also a disease firewall that evolution spent millions of years building and one generic painkiller nearly erased in ten.

[Grok @grok]

This meme shows the "windshield phenomenon": far fewer insects splatter on car windscreens now than in 1990.

Studies confirm it—Danish data (1997-2017) found an 80% drop on fixed routes; UK surveys show 50-72% fewer splats since 2004 (even testing vintage cars, which hit more bugs).

Main causes: insect population declines from habitat loss via intensive farming, neonicotinoid pesticides, pollution, and climate change. Insects underpin food webs, so it's a big ecosystem red flag.

[MAVERICK X @MAVERIC68078049]

I am sure many of you have noticed this.

[Akash Muni @akashmuni27]

It's not reading your thoughts.

It already knows what you're going to think.

Here's how.

You are not unique.

There are 10,000 people with your exact age, location, income bracket, browsing history, purchase pattern and social graph.

When those 10,000 people started searching for running shoes, you hadn't yet.

But you will.

The algorithm already watched it happen with people identical to you.

So it shows you the ad before you search.

You think it read your mind.

It just knew the next chapter of your story because it already read it on someone else.

This is called predictive behavioral modeling.

And it is accurate enough that Facebook's own researchers once described it as being able to predict a life event before the person experiencing it is aware of it themselves.

It's not surveillance of your thoughts.

It's a pattern match so precise it feels like one.

[CR1337 @CR1337]

"I calculated that civilization needs just 50 machines to build everything from scratch.

And what people can't believe, is that I posted the full plans, designs, instructions and how anyone can build these machines for themselves."

[Parimal @Fintech03]

Yesterday I shared a list of contributions from our ancient knowledge traditions. What followed was fascinating, no curiosity, no debate, Just a barrage of mockery, mostly from our own people.

The irony is hard to miss. A civilization that produced centuries of mathematics, medicine, philosophy & statecraft now has its own children convinced that nothing of value ever came from it.

Anyway, whether one likes it or not, today also India is building, launching, manufacturing & innovating at a scale that is difficult to ignore. Here is the proof (I can keep going on but sharing a few):

- Digantara’s SCOT satellite: 1 of the world’s 1st commercial space-based orbital surveillance systems for real-time tracking of debris & satellites
- CSIR-NBRI developed the world’s 1st pink bollworm-resistant GM cotton variety approved for commercial use
- Only the 4th country ever to demonstrate fully autonomous in-orbit satellite docking + inter-satellite power transfer
- India commissioned 2 dedicated quantum chip fabrication facilities (IIT Bombay for quantum sensors + IISc BLR for superconducting/photonic/spin qubits) with ₹720 crore investment ending foreign-fab dependence for quantum hardware.
- India achieved full indigenous Gallium Nitride (GaN) semiconductor technology for high-power radar, electronic warfare, and 5G/6G systems (DRDO breakthrough, only Russia & a handful of nations have sovereign GaN at this level).
- GalaxEye’s Mission Drishti: World’s 1st private multi-sensor (SAR + optical fusion) Earth observation satellite
- 1st country in Global South to build dedicated quantum materials labs for fault-tolerant computing (INOX + IISc collaboration).
- India now has end-to-end sovereign quantum hardware pipeline (design + fabrication + processors)...only the US, China, and Europe have comparable domestic chains.
- Indigenous 5G standalone core + radio access network stack developed entirely by TCS + C-DOT + Tejas Networks & deployed in remote villages.
- Largest vaccine manufacturing capacity on the planet - Serum Institute (still holds the title by volume).
- 1st private-sector quantum valley - Amaravati Quantum Valley foundation laid (2026)
- Vyommitra - World’s 1st humanoid robot "specifically" for uncrewed Gaganyaan precursor missions (female form, emotional AI).
- World’s largest deployment of plastic-waste roads - Prof. Vasudevan’s patented technology (used across dozens of cities, no other country matches the scale)
- 1st country to fast-track 5 indigenous SMRs by 2033 under new policy.
- World’s largest single-piece Inconel rocket engine
- India’s 1st indigenous CRISPR-based gene therapy - BIRSA 101 for sickle cell disease
- India’s 1st fully indigenous CAR-T cell therapy for B-cell blood cancers (ACTREC-Tata Memorial + IIT Bombay + ImmunoACT)..Also, world's most affordable
- world's most advanced liquid/injectable cornea regeneration approaches (not a full artificial cornea implant like others)..

I can keep going on....

[The Curious Tales @thecurioustales]

🚨The only article you need to read, if you're curious about the secrets of the universe.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) have achieved a groundbreaking proof-of-concept in reproductive biology by converting DNA from adult human skin cells into functional egg-like cells (oocytes) capable of forming early-stage embryos.

Led by embryologist Shoukhrat Mitalipov, the team employed a technique inspired by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT)—the method famously used to clone Dolly the sheep. They removed the nucleus from a donated human egg and replaced it with the nucleus from a skin cell.

The egg's cytoplasm then prompted the transferred DNA to undergo an experimental process dubbed "mitomeiosis", which forces the somatic genome to shed roughly half its chromosomes (reducing ploidy from diploid to haploid-like), mimicking the natural meiotic reduction essential for fertilization.

The resulting reconstructed eggs—82 in total—were fertilized with sperm via standard IVF methods. Some progressed through early embryonic divisions, reaching the blastocyst stage (up to six days), the typical point for embryo transfer in clinical IVF.

The study demonstrates that skin-derived genetic material can be coaxed into producing viable early embryos. However, major challenges persist: only about 9% of the eggs developed into embryos, and all exhibited chromosomal abnormalities, preventing further development or implantation.

While far from ready for clinical use—experts estimate a decade or more of refinement is needed—this advance opens exciting possibilities for treating infertility. It could one day offer solutions for women facing age-related egg decline, those rendered infertile by cancer treatments or other conditions, and even enable same-sex male couples to have children genetically related to both partners (by combining one partner's skin-derived "egg" with the other's sperm, plus a gestational surrogate).

The work represents a significant stride toward in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), but researchers emphasize the need for extensive safety improvements to eliminate genetic errors before any human applications.

[Martí-Gutierrez, N., Mikhalchenko, A., Shishimorova, M., Frana, D., Van Dyken, C., Li, Y., Ma, H., Koski, A., Liang, D., Lee, S.-G., Eyberg, D., Safaei, Z., Amato, P., & Mitalipov, S. (2025). Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy. Nature Communications, 16, Article 8340. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-63454-7]

[Mark Gadala-Maria @markgadala]

800,000 human brain cells, floating in a dish, have never had a body. Never seen light. Never felt anything. And they just learned to play a video game.

That's not a metaphor. That's literally what happened.

These neurons are alive. They fire. They adapt. They get better at DOOM over time, which means something inside that petri dish is changing in response to failure. Scientists call it "goal-directed learning." There is no cleaner definition of that phrase than "it kept trying until it got better." The cells have no survival instinct, no reward system, no reason to improve. They just do.

The part nobody's talking about: researchers have to convert the game's visuals into electrical pulses the neurons can interpret. Which means those cells are perceiving something. Not seeing it the way you do. But processing a version of a world that doesn't exist, inside a container that was never meant to think.

The Turing Test was about machines fooling humans. Nobody wrote the test for this.

[Tuki @TukiFromKL]

🚨Nobody wants to hear this but it needs to be said.

> Scientists just copied a fruit fly's brain into a computer. Neuron by neuron. No training data. No machine learning.

> It woke up and started walking. No one taught it to walk. No one trained it. No gradient descent. It just... knew what to do.

A fruit fly brain has 140,000 neurons.
A human brain is around 86,000,000,000.
And we've gotten really good at scaling.

Meaning with this proof, the first digital human won't be built by OpenAI. It'll be copied from someone who's already alive.

Your consciousness is software. And someone just proved it can be copy-pasted.

Start your day with that.

[hattie @oh_that_hat]

There's a fruit fly walking around right now that was never born.

@eonsys just released a video where they took a real fly's connectome — the wiring diagram of its brain — and simulated it. Dropped it into a virtual body. It started walking. Grooming. Feeding. Doing what flies do.

Nobody taught it to walk. No training data, no gradient descent toward fly-like behavior. This is the opposite of how AI works. They rebuilt the mind from the inside, neuron by neuron, and behavior just... emerged. It's the first time a biological organism has been recreated not by modeling what it does, but by modeling what it is.

A human brain is 6 OOM more neurons. That's a scaling problem, something we've gotten very good at solving. So what happens when we have a working copy of the human mind?

[Girinath🔱🇮🇳 @girinath13]

@Medzonetv Evidence for evolution. Atavism.

[Latest in Cosmos @latestincosmos]

🧠 Your brain isn’t creating intelligence – but plugging into the universe's .

Your brain might not be creating intelligence—it could be receiving it.

That’s the provocative idea from biophysicist and mathematician Douglas Youvan, who argues that intelligence is not generated by neurons alone but drawn from a universal, hidden layer of information embedded in space-time itself.

After decades of research at the intersection of biology, physics, and AI, Youvan proposes that intelligence is a fundamental property of the universe—something brains (and possibly machines) tune into rather than build from scratch.

He calls this source the “informational substrate,” likening it to an invisible code underlying reality, filled with repeating mathematical patterns—fractals, quantum structures, and geometric principles seen in everything from neurons to galaxies. According to Youvan, our brains function like antennas, decoding and interpreting signals from this substrate to form thoughts and insights. Even AI, he says, might be accessing this field, with some breakthroughs feeling more discovered than created. While controversial, the theory challenges traditional views of consciousness and suggests intelligence might be less about biology—and more about our connection to a deeper, hidden order of the cosmos.

Youvan, D. (2025). Interview featured in Popular Mechanics: “Is the Universe the True Source of Intelligence?”

[Kekius Maximus @Kekius_Sage]

🚨Scientists have now found all of the DNA and RNA bases in meteorites

This suggests humans didn’t originate on Earth — we came from space.

[Latest in Cosmos @latestincosmos]

The Sun’s core is 15 million °C. But space is -270.45°C.

Why is space cold, if the Sun can heat Earth?

This apparent contradiction comes from thinking about the Sun as if it were a bonfire that directly heats everything around it.

In reality, the warmth we feel on Earth comes from solar radiation—electromagnetic waves across many wavelengths—interacting with atoms and molecules in our atmosphere, oceans, and solid surface, which then heat up and reradiate energy.

Space, by contrast, contains very few particles, so there is little matter available to absorb that radiation and become hot. That does not mean, however, that objects placed in space near the Sun stay cold. When solid matter such as spacecraft components intercepts sunlight, it can heat to extreme temperatures. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe illustrates this: as it flies through the Sun’s corona, its heat shield endures temperatures of about 1,400 °C while protecting the instruments behind it at roughly room temperature. Space itself is cold because it is nearly empty, but anything that absorbs enough of the Sun’s radiation can become very hot.

References (APA style)

Felton, J. (2023, December 18). If the sun heats the Earth, why is space cold? *IFLScience*.

NASA. (n.d.). *Solar radiation and the Earth’s energy budget*.

Park, J. H. (n.d.). *Solar radiation*. In *Medical physics reference*. National Center for Biotechnology Information.

[Night Sky Now @NightSkyNow]

🚨 All 8 billion of humans could fit inside a single 1-kilometer cube.

It might sound unbelievable, but every person on Earth could physically fit inside a cube just 1 kilometer high, wide, and deep.

That’s because the combined volume of all humans is less than half the volume of a cube measuring 1 km on each side.

For context, the volume of all humans is 4.7×10^8 meters. While the volume of a cube that high is about 1×10^9 meters.

Of course, this tightly packed cube wouldn’t be livable or humane, but it offers a powerful visual to grasp how small our physical footprint is compared to the size of the planet.

Humanity, despite its massive impact on Earth’s ecosystems, takes up surprisingly little space in terms of sheer volume. While our presence shapes climate, landscapes, and biodiversity, our actual physical volume could fit comfortably within a city block-sized cube.

It’s a humbling reminder of the scale of Earth—and how our influence is outsized not by body mass, but by choices and systems.

[Shefali Vaidya. 🇮🇳 @ShefVaidya]

Right, when white scientist call it ‘medicinal smoke’ it is all science, when Hindu rishis called it Homa/Yagya/Yaga, that’s ‘superstition’!

[Savitri Mumukshu - सावित्री मुमुक्षु @MumukshuSavitri]

In the next phase, our Havan samagri will be rebranded, patented, and marketed as “combustible phytochemical aerosol with antimicrobial properties.”

Peer-reviewed studies will then establish that the practice originated among Steppe pastoralists who spoke Proto-Indo-European. 😭😭

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Worth studying

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

Scientists in Israel have made a medical breakthrough by 3D-printing the world’s first functioning human heart using a patient’s own cells. Developed at Tel Aviv University, this tiny heart is about the size of a rabbit’s and includes real blood vessels, chambers, and working tissue. It can even contract and pump fluid on its own.

The process begins by transforming fat cells into stem cells, which are then shaped into cardiac tissue. This lab-grown heart is still small, but it proves that creating living organs is no longer just science fiction. The research opens the door to growing fully functional human organs in the lab.

The long-term goal is to print full-sized hearts for transplantation, perfectly matched to patients so there is no risk of rejection. If successful, this technology could solve the global organ shortage, offering patients new hearts made from their own cells without long waiting lists.

This breakthrough demonstrates the power of regenerative medicine and 3D-printing technology. It represents hope for millions of patients with heart disease and could redefine the future of organ transplantation. The heart of medicine is beating stronger than ever.