Pen 🌻

X Geek, Love nature, beauty, honesty & peace of mind.
Working to be better at my craft everyday.
Words are powerful, use them with care.

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

Death Valley transformed into a beautiful living garden.. #FragilePlanet

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Death Valley National Park experienced its first major superbloom in a decade this year, driven by record winter rainfall (1.7 – 2.5+ inches) that transformed the desert landscape with vibrant carpets of yellow, pink, and purple flowers.

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

#momentsofjoy

[Melissa & Chris Bruntlett @modacitylife]

What if—instead of misery and stress—our transportation networks could actually bring us joy? #Utrecht

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

@albertdrosphoto They are beautiful!

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

@SandyHorne61 So pretty Sandy! Lucky you! 😍

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

@albertdrosphoto Happy joyous day of your birth! 🙏🏻🌻

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

Sunscreen - palm oil free! About the wildlife and our health! Choose Palm Oil Free every time.. 🙌🏻

[Palm Oil Detectives #BoycottPalmOil @PalmOilDetect]

Protect yourself from the #sun 🌞⛱️🌻 while protecting 1000’s of #animals 🦧🦜🪲🦏🐘 from #palmoil #ecocide. Reject #beauty brands like #Loreal and Avon and find #PalmOilFree #Sunscreen. Fight back now! #BoycottPalmOil #Boycott4Wildlife @palmoildetect https://t.co/58o3C1NBbF

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

@SandyHorne61 Well done Sandy! The Power of One. 🙏🏻💪🙂

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

What a sweet guy! 😻

[PROTECT ALL WILDLIFE @Protect_Wldlife]

Love this ❤️

The window cleaner's day was officially made by the Cat 😻.

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

This is going to be such a game changer for the veterans in the US who have lung disease from breathing in toxic gases and smoking tobacco as a stress reliever while fighting wars.. Just wonderful! 🙏🏻😊

[4DMedical @4DMedicalXV]

Proud to join @bioAffinity Technologies, @Philips & @navref for a July 21 educational webinar on emerging approaches to lung health screening for U.S. veterans.

Greg Mogel, MD, 4DMedical CMO and U.S. Army Medical Corps veteran, will join the panel.

For pulmonary, oncology, radiology, primary care & veteran health professionals.

Register: https://t.co/6yquT81Joq
Full info/press release in comments.

#VeteransHealth #LungHealth #Radiology #MedTech

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

Stunning seeing Horsehead Nebula up close! How lucky are we to be able to look at it like it was outside our window! Very cool.. 😎

[Astropics @astropics]

Hubble has captured the sharpest infrared image to date of the Horsehead Nebula in the Orion constellation. It's a towering pillar of gas and dust rising about 5 light-years high, unveiling delicate folds of hidden gas beyond the dusty veil.

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

@Rainmaker1973 It's real. We had one the same last year.. huge damage done in 10 minutes! Massive tall gum tree knocked over from the force!

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

@SandyHorne61 😢 How horrible!

[Palm Oil Detectives #BoycottPalmOil @PalmOilDetect]

The world’s largest #skink 🌍🦎 is the Solomon Islands Skink, a #lizard endemic to #Melanesia 🇸🇧 They are ‘Near Threatened’ from #palmoil and other threats, help them to survive 🌴☠️⛔️ #Boycottpalmoil #Boycott4Wildlife @palmoildetect https://t.co/OyWmjedfKd

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

Best news ! If all countries across the world follow suit, how sweet the air would be!

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

France has introduced one of the world’s toughest environmental laws by criminalizing “ecocide” under its Climate and Resilience Act.

The new legislation allows courts to impose severe penalties on companies and executives responsible for severe and lasting damage to air, water, or soil. Convicted offenders can face fines of up to €4.5 million, or up to ten times the profits gained from the violation, along with prison sentences of up to 10 years.

This marks a significant cultural and legal shift, elevating environmental protection to the same level of seriousness as threats to public safety or human life.

The law is part of a growing international movement, driven by activists, scientists, and legal experts, to treat large-scale ecological destruction as a serious crime rather than a mere business cost.

While some critics worry the law may prove difficult to enforce, it reflects a broader recognition that the health of the planet’s ecosystems is essential to human survival.

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

So true.. love imperfection! Perfect in every other way.. 🤓

[Curiosity @CuriosityonX]

We've seen the Moon a thousand times.

Glowing. Flawless. Color-graded into a poster.

So clean we half-suspect it's CGI.

Then four people actually flew out there in 2026, pressed a camera to a smudged spacecraft window, and shot through the dust and the reflections and a fingerprint or two.

And that one — the imperfect one, the one that looks like your uncle took it — is the one that finally feels real.

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

@SandyHorne61 I guess no one wants AI but love the convenience of cloud computing.. 🤷🏼‍♀️

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

@paulmp Yes! That is so good Paul! I did a full ancestry search and such a fascinating mob I come from! For me it is mainly Spanish, Irish and Scottish.. so explains my blonde and redhead days when I was a teen and my fair skin. Wonderful to do!

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Scientists have detected a vast underwater structure spanning approximately 9,000 miles that may be driving one of the strongest El Niño events in recorded history.

Known as a Kelvin wave, this giant pulse of unusually warm water is traveling eastward beneath the surface of the equatorial Pacific. In some areas, temperatures within the current are reaching up to 13.5 degrees Fahrenheit (7.5 degrees Celsius) above normal, an exceptionally high anomaly for deep ocean waters.

Kelvin waves form when strong wind bursts push warm surface water across the Pacific from west to east. As the heat spreads, it disrupts normal ocean circulation and helps trigger El Niño conditions, a climate pattern known for reshaping weather systems worldwide.

Researchers are particularly concerned because this wave resembles the one that preceded the devastating 1997-98 super El Niño, which caused widespread flooding, severe droughts, crop failures, wildfires, and disease outbreaks globally. Historical super El Niño events have even been linked to famines that claimed tens of millions of lives.

The situation may be even more severe this time. Global ocean temperatures are already at record levels, meaning the atmosphere holds significantly more heat and moisture than in previous major El Niño years. This extra energy is likely to intensify extreme weather events, including powerful storms, heat waves, heavy rainfall, and droughts.

El Niño impacts vary by region. Some areas face catastrophic flooding while others endure prolonged drought. Marine ecosystems often suffer as warm waters reduce nutrient upwelling, collapsing fisheries and triggering widespread coral bleaching.

Scientists are closely monitoring the evolution of this enormous Kelvin wave over the coming months as it continues to develop.

[Pen 🌻 @penva]

If you read just this, you will be fulfilled tonight. 👌

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A German neuroscientist published a book in 2012 arguing that smartphones are quietly producing the first generation in human history whose brains will shrink before they turn 30, and the media spent the next decade trying to destroy him for saying it.

His name is Manfred Spitzer.

He runs the Psychiatric University Hospital in Ulm and directs Germany's largest transfer center for neuroscience and education.

The book is called Digitale Demenz, which translates as Digital Dementia, and it became one of the best-selling popular science books in German history almost the moment it was published.

The press hated him for it. He was called Germany's most controversial brain scientist, accused of being a Luddite, a moral panic merchant, and a fearmonger who hated children.

None of that stopped the book from being translated into more than a dozen languages, and almost none of it engaged with the actual neuroscience he was citing.

The phrase digital dementia did not even start with him.

It started with South Korean doctors in the late 2000s, who noticed something strange in their clinics. Patients in their twenties were arriving with memory complaints that had previously only shown up in much older adults. Forgetting numbers they used to know by heart. Losing the ability to recall directions in cities they had lived in for years. Struggling to remember conversations from earlier the same day.

The doctors connected it to the rise of smartphone use, which had hit South Korea harder and earlier than almost any other country on Earth. Spitzer picked up the phrase and built an entire book around the neuroscience that explained it.

The core thesis is brutally simple. The brain behaves like a muscle. It grows when you use it, and it atrophies when you do not. Every cognitive task you outsource to a device is a task your brain is no longer practicing, and the neural circuits responsible for that task are no longer being reinforced. Over time, they weaken in exactly the same way an unused muscle weakens.

Spitzer was not arguing that smartphones would give you Alzheimer's. He was arguing that decades of cognitive outsourcing would produce a measurable decline in the underlying machinery, long before any clinical diagnosis would catch it, and that the decline was already showing up in young adults.

The mechanism is what made him impossible to dismiss. By the early 2010s, there was already deep evidence that the brain physically remodels itself in response to use. London taxi drivers who had memorized the entire street map of the city had measurably larger hippocampi than the average person, which is the brain region responsible for spatial memory.

Musicians who practiced for thousands of hours had thicker auditory cortices. Spitzer's argument was just the dark side of the same finding. If the brain grows in response to use, then it must shrink in response to neglect. And if every cognitive task adults used to perform with their own memory, navigation, arithmetic, attention, and reading was now being handled by a glowing rectangle in their pocket, then the regions responsible for all of those tasks were quietly being underused for the first time in human evolutionary history.

Then the supporting data started landing.

A 2020 study at McGill University tracked 50 regular drivers and measured GPS use. The heavy users had weaker spatial memory than the rest, and when researchers retested a subset three years later, those users had declined the fastest. The same hippocampus London cabbies had built up by ignoring shortcuts was being slowly hollowed out in everyone else by accepting them.

A 2024 MIT study scanned the brains of people writing essays with and without ChatGPT. The AI group showed 55 percent weaker brain connectivity than the group writing on their own. 83 percent of the ChatGPT users could not recall a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. The damage stayed even when the tool was taken away.

A 2024 paper out of Norway recorded EEG scans of students writing words by hand versus typing them. The handwriting condition lit up the entire learning network. The typing condition produced almost nothing.

Every one of these findings is exactly what Spitzer predicted in 2012.

The most uncomfortable line in his book is the one almost nobody in the German press wanted to print.

He pointed out that the people building these devices were not letting their own children use them. Steve Jobs did not let his kids near an iPad. Bill Gates capped his children's screen time at 30 minutes a day. The senior engineers at Google were sending their kids to Waldorf schools that banned screens entirely.

The people who knew the most about what these products were doing to the developing brain were the ones protecting their own families from them, and almost nobody on the outside was asking why.

The generation he was warning about is now in their twenties.

The first cognitive scans of what we did to them are starting to come back, and the pattern is exactly what he said it would be.

The brain you were born with is not the brain you will die with.

You are training it every day. The only question is which direction.

[NASA Solar System @NASASolarSystem]

Did you see Venus and the Moon last night? Tonight after sunset, watch for the crescent Moon to appear between Jupiter and Venus.