John Nohr

[John Nohr @john_nohr]

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon.

🌖 🦅 🇺🇸 America250 🇺🇸 🦅 🚀

[NASA @NASA]

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the Moon.

[John Nohr @john_nohr]

Noah Lee, out of Mineral Wells, Texas, is ranked near the top of the world standings for a reason. Here he takes the lead at the Corn Palace Stampede Rodeo Bull Bash with a solid ride on “Party Bus.”

[John Nohr @john_nohr]

Independence Day weekend may be over, but the sacred fight for American Independence and Liberty has only just begun. Many more anniversaries of struggle and triumph lie ahead.
The celebration continues all the way to 2034! 💥USA250!💥
🦅🇺🇸America 250! 🇺🇸🦅

[1776 Live @250YearsAgoLive]

The first public reading of the Declaration of Independence takes place in Philadelphia, summoned by the ringing of the Liberty Bell.

John Nixon conducts the reading.

[John Nohr @john_nohr]

ON THIS DAY: Thomas Paine publishes an open letter in the Pennsylvania Evening Post, under the name “Republicus,” which advocates for the name “United States of America” for the new nation now emerging.

This is the first time such a term has been used.

[1776 Live @250YearsAgoLive]

Thomas Paine publishes an open letter in the Pennsylvania Evening Post, under the name “Republicus,” which advocates for the name “United States of America” for the new nation now emerging.

This is the first time such a term has been used.

[John Nohr @john_nohr]

@BookNoteApp Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K. Massie.

[John Nohr @john_nohr]

@TimelessTrvlr Amazing. Visited last week.

[John Nohr @john_nohr]

@xmuse_ Barcelona! 🇪🇸

[John Nohr @john_nohr]

@xmuse_ Stopped by yesterday. Beautiful!

[John Nohr @john_nohr]

@Rainmaker1973 Stopped by yesterday. Beautiful!

[Ihtesham Ali @ihteshamali]

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.

[John Nohr @john_nohr]

A beautiful, calm morning for a paddle on Lake Mitchell. Along the shoreline, everything is springing to life: the soft light-green leaves of the Russian olive, the old cedar tree lying horizontally across the water, and the blossoming honeysuckle. Turtles are out in full force.

[John Nohr @john_nohr]

The work of South Dakota videographer Kevin Kjergaard is truly amazing. 🎥

[CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 @CBSSunday]

We leave you this Mother's Day Sunday with mares caring for their foals in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Videographer: Kevin Kjergaard.

[CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 @CBSSunday]

We leave you this Mother's Day Sunday with mares caring for their foals in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Videographer: Kevin Kjergaard.

[John Nohr @john_nohr]

What’s up in May?
Shooting stars, Venus, and a Blue Moon
🌎 ☄️🔭 🌝

[NASA @NASA]

What’s in the night sky for May?

In this month’s episode of “What’s Up,” see how to spot the Eta Aquarid meteor shower, find out when we’ll get a blue moon, and learn more about a celestial meetup between the Moon and Venus.

Happy skywatching! https://t.co/2VCImgLyGD

[John Nohr @john_nohr]

@weatherchannel Lake Mitchell, South Dakota

[John Nohr @john_nohr]

@earthcurated

[John Nohr @john_nohr]

Friday morning kayak paddle. 🛶Sunrise near Camp Arroya on Lake Mitchell, SD 🇺🇸 🛶 🌞

[NASA's Kennedy Space Center @NASAKennedy]

"Humanity is calling us to explore the Moon and then to share with the world to motivate. We might motivate 10 kids to do something great; we might motivate one kid to do something great, and that is a success to me," said Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman.

Four astronauts could launch around the Moon as soon as April 1. Watch their news conference here. https://t.co/EHsgr0Gcch

[Special Olympics USA Games @2026USAGames]

TODAY IS THE DAY!! Head to the closest @jerseymikes location near you and eat that sub to support Special Olympics USA Games athletes! 100% of sales - not just profits - will go to help the nearly 3,000 athletes who will compete at the Games in Minnesota this summer.

[John Nohr @john_nohr]

What’s up in March?
Eclipse 🌑
Conjunction 🪐
Equinox 🌸
🔭

[NASA @NASA]

What's up for March?

The Moon will appear red during a total lunar eclipse on March 3. On the 8th, Venus and Saturn snuggle close in the night sky. Plus, March 20 is the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere. More: https://t.co/Ohi4c6w6FR