Crystal Concepcion 🦋

Mom. Wife. Daughter. Researcher. @UofIllinois #plant #food #metabolomics #photosynthesis 🌱 Views are my own.

[Crystal Concepcion 🦋 @jenicka13]

Today I gave a guest #lecture in a 1st yr #PlantBiology UG class at @UofIllinois
My talk was about “Light: Needed But Not In Excess”
I tackled the light reactions, #Photosystem II in detail, #Photoinhibition, various mechanisms of #Photoprotection used by plants & #Photodamage.

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

Underrated life advice: Become generous with your assumptions. Assume they were tired, not rude. Overwhelmed, not careless. Preoccupied, not distant. This doesn’t mean tolerate disrespect. It means stop turning every small moment into a personal attack. Grace makes life lighter.

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Nobody wants a city on Mars. Nobody wants AI in every app. Nobody wants a robot butler. Nobody wants data centers everywhere. Nobody wants flying cars or humanoid robots. We want clean water, we want bees to survive, and we want a habitable planet.

[Crystal Concepcion 🦋 @jenicka13]

Agree!

[Mark Hyman, M.D. @drmarkhyman]

Laughter is anti-inflammatory. Crying is regulating. Hugging is immunoprotective. Singing is vagal toning. Dancing is neurogenic.

Joy is a biological necessity.

[Tai Lopez @tailopez]

Marcus Aurelius was right when he said the crowd will forget you no matter what you do. So the only real question is whether you spent your years chasing their approval or actually living for yourself.

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Some of you take these jobs way too seriously. No job is worth snitching on coworkers, skipping breaks, coming in on your days off, working unpaid overtime, or refusing to use your PTO or call out. Especially not for dead-end jobs with zero room for growth.

[Blake Burge @blakeaburge]

A rule that will improve your life: Never assume bad intent, but don’t ignore repeated patterns. Everyone gets grace. Nobody gets unlimited passes.

[Governor JB Pritzker @GovPritzker]

Data centers are asking just too much for too little in return.

I'm pausing the release of any new data center tax incentives in Illinois — and I'm calling on the General Assembly to act in veto session to make sure data centers are paying their fair share.

[Mr. Nobody @MmisterNobody]

It feels like Earth was designed perfectly for us, rain falling from the sky, food growing from the ground, yet somehow we’ve built a world where people need good credit scores, multiple jobs, and 40-hour workweeks just to survive

[ɴᴀᴅɪ.🎀༘ @luvblessingz]

They will literally ban this in the United States because some dental corporation cries to the government that it will lose money.

[Dale Chu @Dale_Chu]

“The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.”

[The Wall Street Journal @WSJ]

Employers are clamoring for workers who can do doctor-like work but who are trained faster and can cost them less https://t.co/B1HwguWX2R

[CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil @CBSEveningNews]

CBS News Radio signed off the air Friday night after nearly a century of broadcasting. Current and former employees were there to listen to the final broadcast.

[Inquirer @inquirerdotnet]

From writing stories inside the halls of University of the Philippines Diliman during the Marcos dictatorship to leading a major academic institution in the United States, Filipino American scientist Michael Purugganan has taken on a new chapter in his career.

READ MORE: https://t.co/4YwiMnxci6

[Acyn @Acyn]

AOC: This is what drinking water in Georgia looks like after Meta began data center construction in the community.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

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.

[⚡︎ @_sorrengailll]

Unpopular Opinion:

Caps & Gowns should be FREE at universities whenever a student is graduating.

[Kurt Supe, CPA & Retirement Planner @KurtSupeCPA]

I was sitting with an 80 year old.

I asked him what advice he'd give himself at 55.

He didn't think about it.

He said: Stop saying I'll retire next year.

The good years in retirement go by fast.

He told me he said it at 55. Then 58. Then 62.

He finally walked away at 67.

His wife wasn't up for long trips anymore.

They never saw the grandkids grow up the way they planned.

He said: The years you think you're buying with one more year of work. You're not buying them. You're spending them.

I've been thinking about it ever since.

This doesn't mean you have to stop working.

Some people love what they do. Some people need the structure. Some people aren't financially ready and that's a real conversation.

The question is different.

Are you living life on your terms?

[The Philippine Star @PhilippineStar]

To the person who, no matter how old we get, we would always seek comfort from: Happy Mother’s Day! 💗

[Disaster News @Top_Disaster]

Terrifying eruption of Mayon Volcano in Albay, Philippines 🇵🇭 (02.05.2026)