Paul Stewart

#Photographer #AI Curious

[Paul Stewart @mouthtosource]

@ThomasDolby Top roster.

[Paul Stewart @mouthtosource]

Hahahahaha

[Paul Stewart @mouthtosource]

@ghadaa231 Slovenia 🇸🇮

[Paul Stewart @mouthtosource]

@CT_RSTA @johanstrauss89 @CMArchibald You’re a bot.

[Paul Stewart @mouthtosource]

@CT_RSTA @johanstrauss89 @CMArchibald I suggest you stand in front of an exploding missile and see if you can pick your pieces up.

[Paul Stewart @mouthtosource]

@IAmClintMurphy @Finiteturtle @Abu_Salah9 Clint, do you believe in international law?

[Paul Stewart @mouthtosource]

@NoContextHumans Hahahahaha!

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The math on this project should mass-humble every AI lab on the planet.

1 cubic millimeter. One-millionth of a human brain. Harvard and Google spent 10 years mapping it. The imaging alone took 326 days. They sliced the tissue into 5,000 wafers each 30 nanometers thick, ran them through a $6 million electron microscope, then needed Google’s ML models to stitch the 3D reconstruction because no human team could process the output.

The result: 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, compressed into 1.4 petabytes of raw data. For context, 1.4 petabytes is roughly 1.4 million gigabytes. From a speck smaller than a grain of rice.

Now scale that. The full human brain is one million times larger. Mapping the whole thing at this resolution would produce approximately 1.4 zettabytes of data. That’s roughly equal to all the data generated on Earth in a single year. The storage alone would cost an estimated $50 billion and require a 140-acre data center, which would make it the largest on the planet.

And they found things textbooks don’t contain. One neuron had over 5,000 connection points. Some axons had coiled themselves into tight whorls for completely unknown reasons. Pairs of cell clusters grew in mirror images of each other. Jeff Lichtman, the Harvard lead, said there’s “a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.”

This is why the next step isn’t a human brain. It’s a mouse hippocampus, 10 cubic millimeters, over the next five years. Because even a mouse brain is 1,000x larger than what they just mapped, and the full mouse connectome is the proof of concept before anyone attempts the human one.

We’re building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we’re trying to imitate. The original is 1.4 petabytes per millionth of its volume. Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that.

The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull. The data center required to merely describe one-millionth of it would span 140 acres.

[Heritage Matters🔱 @HeritageMatterz]

The Hurdy-Gurdy, Medieval European string instrument.

The hurdy-gurdy's earliest known origin dates back to the 10th century.

Musician: Andrey Vinogradov

[GP Q @argosaki]

BREASTMILK
She thought she was studying milk.
What she uncovered was a conversation.

In 2008, evolutionary anthropologist Katie Hinde was working in a primate research lab in California, analyzing breast milk from rhesus macaque mothers. She had hundreds of samples and thousands of data points. Everything looked ordinary—until one pattern refused to go away.

Mothers raising sons produced milk richer in fat and protein.
Mothers raising daughters produced a larger volume with different nutrient balances.

It was consistent. Repeatable. And deeply uncomfortable for the scientific consensus.

Colleagues suggested error. Noise. Statistical coincidence.
But Katie trusted the data.

And the data pointed to a radical idea.

Milk is not just nutrition.
It is information.

For decades, biology treated breast milk as simple fuel. Calories in. Growth out. But if milk were only calories, why would it change depending on the sex of the baby?

Katie kept digging.

Across more than 250 mothers and over 700 sampling events, the story grew more complex. Younger, first-time mothers produced milk with fewer calories but significantly higher levels of cortisol—the stress hormone.

The babies who drank it grew faster.
They were also more alert, more cautious, more anxious.

Milk wasn’t just building bodies.
It was shaping behavior.

Then came the discovery that changed everything.

When a baby nurses, microscopic amounts of saliva flow back into the breast. That saliva carries biological signals about the infant’s immune system. If the baby is getting sick, the mother’s body detects it.

Within hours, the milk changes.

White blood cells surge.
Macrophages multiply.
Targeted antibodies appear.

When the baby recovers, the milk returns to baseline.

This was not coincidence.
It was call and response.

A biological dialogue refined over millions of years. Invisible—until someone thought to listen.

As Katie reviewed existing research, she noticed something unsettling. There were twice as many scientific studies on erectile dysfunction as on breast milk composition.

The first food every human consumes.
The substance that shaped our species.
Largely ignored.

So she did something bold.

She launched a blog with a deliberately provocative name: Mammals Suck Milk.
It exploded. Over a million readers in its first year. Parents. Doctors. Scientists. People asking questions research had skipped.

The discoveries kept coming.

Milk changes by time of day.
Foremilk differs from hindmilk.
Human milk contains over 200 oligosaccharides babies can’t digest—because they exist to feed beneficial gut bacteria.
Every mother’s milk is biologically unique.

In 2017, Katie brought this work to a TED stage. In 2020, it reached a global audience through Netflix’s Babies. Today, at Arizona State University’s Comparative Lactation Lab, she continues reshaping how medicine understands infant development, neonatal care, formula design, and public health.

The implications are staggering.

Milk has been evolving for more than 200 million years—longer than dinosaurs walked the Earth. What we once dismissed as simple nourishment is one of the most sophisticated communication systems biology has ever produced.

Katie Hinde didn’t just study milk.
She revealed that nourishment is intelligence.
A living, responsive system shaping who we become before we ever speak.

All because one scientist refused to accept that half the story was “measurement error.”

Sometimes the biggest revolutions begin by listening to what everyone else ignores.

[Paul Stewart @mouthtosource]

Listen to this… Locking up people in concentration camps in USA is a business … who gets the kick back? Who pays? https://t.co/HA81YBB8Ga

[Voice of Rabbis @voiceofrabbis]

English Journalist Robert Fisk views on someone who criticize Israel.

[Paul Stewart @mouthtosource]

@mark_lj Epic!

[Paul Stewart @mouthtosource]

@DamianShields1 Stoater

[Paul Stewart @mouthtosource]

@DamianShields1 Hey Damian, you shoot such beautiful shots of the highlands. Wouldn’t you like to see forests or a more balanced landscape? Curious.

[Tiberius @tiberiusfiles]

Israel has killed 380,000 infants under five years old

[Paul Stewart @mouthtosource]

@DamianShields1 Crackerjack.

[Jack Perks @JackPerksPhoto]

Cuckoo wrasse are colourful fish native to UK coasts that are easily distinguished by sexual dimorphism: males are blue and orange, while females are orangey-pink with black. They have a unique reproductive cycle where the largest female can change sex to male if needed.

[Paul Stewart @mouthtosource]

@djmarkfarina The new kitchen is looking fabulous! Something jazzy with Mushrooms please.

[Paul Stewart @mouthtosource]

@djmarkfarina Kitchen and parties 🥳