I've learned today that a new color has been discovered!
Scientists from UC Berkeley discovered a new color they are calling "olo". It's a highly saturated shade of blue-green.
But it's actually impossible to see without the assistance of technology, so lasers were used to stimulate the M (middle-wavelength) cone cells without triggering the neighboring L and S cones.
The last major discovery of a new color before that was in 2009. YInMn Blue, a pigment, was discovered by accident by Professor Mas Subramanian and his team at Oregon State University when they were testing materials for electronics.
🚨BREAKING: A cognitive scientist from MIT has mathematically proven that evolution guarantees we see zero percent of true reality, that most consciousness in the universe exists without a body, and that non-human intelligences with a wider window on reality than ours can reach in and manipulate it the way a programmer manipulates a video game.
Donald Hoffman (@donalddhoffman) is a cognitive scientist at UC Irvine who has spent 40 years building a mathematical theory of the observer. His work was cited by John Wheeler in the "It From Bit" paper. He studied under Marvin Minsky at MIT, spent two decades secretly meeting with Francis Crick to study consciousness, and has nine specific mathematical conjectures on the table that would derive general relativity, quantum field theory and the Big Bang from a single framework. The top high-energy physicists in the world, Nima Arkani-Hamed and Nobel laureate David Gross, are already saying spacetime is doomed. Hoffman thinks he knows what replaces it.
This interview is the first time he has publicly laid out what his mathematical model explains about alien life, embodiment and the structure of reality.
It already derives time dilation and quantum wave functions directly from differences in observer window size. Physics has spent a century failing to solve the measurement problem because it has been looking in the wrong place. The observer has to come first, and no physicalist framework can get you there.
A consciousness with a larger observer window has access to the underlying structure of our reality in ways we can't perceive or counter. A craft going Mach 40 instantaneously in our headset could be a leisurely maneuver in theirs.
The implications for UAP and alien life are immense.
Embodiment, being locked into a body with fingers and toes as your only interface with the world, is a probability zero anomaly in the full space of possible minds. He also says current large language models are dumber than cucumbers. His new framework, the recursive trace logic, is a completely different architecture, and some of the biggest names in frontier AI have already come to him about it.
The framework has no ceiling, and the implication is a single unified consciousness exploring itself through an unbounded number of perspectives, each one capable of waking up.
Death, in this framework, is just the closing of an icon on the desktop.
Full conversation is live now.
A Stanford psychologist spent 4 years proving that the simple act of walking generates 60% more creative ideas than sitting, and the experiment she designed to kill every alternative explanation is one of the most decisive findings in modern psychology.
Her name is Marily Oppezzo.
She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.
She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.
The result was almost too clean to publish.
81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves.
On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.
The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.
Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision.
She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.
Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.
The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.
This is the part of the study that hit hardest when I read it the first time.
She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it.
Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.
Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.
When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.
The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.
When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.
The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes.
The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.
You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.
The history of this is the part that should haunt anyone who still does meetings in chairs.
Charles Darwin built a gravel loop behind his house in Kent called the Sandwalk and walked it 3 times a day for the rest of his life. The theory of evolution was developed one lap at a time on that path.
Nietzsche walked up to 10 hours a day during the years he wrote his most important books and openly said the work was conceived on his feet.
Beethoven composed for the morning and walked for 5 hours every afternoon with a pencil in his pocket for when something landed.
Kahneman said the best thinking of his Nobel Prize-winning career happened on leisurely walks with Amos Tversky. Steve Jobs refused to take important conversations sitting down. He held them on foot.
Every one of them was using the system Oppezzo would not measure until 2014. They just did not know what to call it.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost nobody asks.
Every meeting you have ever attended sitting around a table was a meeting held at a fraction of the brain power that was actually available to the people in the room. Every brainstorm that got stuck inside a conference room. Every problem you tried to solve at a desk and gave up on. Every idea you could not quite get to.
The intervention is the easiest one in modern science. No supplement. No app. No subscription. No training program. Just a pair of legs and 15 minutes.
The Stanford lab proved it. The philosophers knew it. The neuroscience explains it.
And almost everyone reading this is still trying to think their way out of problems sitting completely still.
playing hide-and-seek with 3yo son. just the two of us. he wants to hide together. we are hiding together. we are in the closet. it’s perfectly dark. we’re very cramped. there is no one looking for us. i am trying to explain this. he is laughing uncontrollably
@bryan_johnson I’m not Christian but this is the best app for learning how to pray the top few basic prayers. It works so well, I LOVE it, I use it morning and night
https://t.co/WuiIiUS7Ek
Homeschooling parents make a decision to experience life with their children.
They commit to being full-time caregivers & educators, taking all the shots society slings at them, because they believe they're the best leaders for their children.
It takes grit to homeschool.
Barbara O’Neill makes a bold case for rebounding on a mini-trampoline: it’s the one exercise that hits every single cell in your body, including your brain cells, because of the constant acceleration and deceleration.
She shows simple moves — gentle bounces building into twists, arm swings, even kid-friendly play — and claims just a few minutes can energize you like nothing else. Albert Carter’s rule of three minutes, three times a day. Her office idea: one minute every hour and watch productivity soar.
What really landed for me is how something this playful and low-impact could upgrade your whole system from the inside out.
Science backs a big part of it — NASA research and studies show rebounding stimulates lymphatic flow far more efficiently than most exercises (up to 15-30x in some claims), improves oxygen delivery to cells, and gives cardiovascular benefits with less joint stress than running.
In a fitness world full of complicated routines, this feels like an accessible, full-body reset that actually touches circulation, focus, and daily energy in a different way.
Have you ever tried rebounding, or would you add a mini-trampoline to your routine if you could?
If your child reads and writes for 5,000 to 10,000 hours before the age of 13, they're going to be more developed than a child who gets 1,000 to 2,000 hours in school and then goes home to watch screens. The math is simple. You can't really do enough reading and writing.
I built a tool that ranks health influencers by how well their claims match 150,000 research papers.
Here's the leaderboard.
Will post more results soon!