Ryan

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@_DanielSinclair Automowers are sweet

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@thesamparr @levelsio Rolex ad

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@US_Stormwatch Wow

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

Cool

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

Every Olympic endurance coach in the world now tapes their athletes' mouths shut at night because a Swedish lab proved in 1995 that the nose produces a gas the mouth cannot, and that single gas determines whether your blood absorbs 100% of the oxygen you inhale or only 82%.

The gas is nitric oxide.

The lab was the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. The discovery was published in Nature Medicine that same year, and it quietly rewrote everything respiratory physiology thought it knew about why humans have a nose in the first place.

Here is what they actually found.

The empty air-filled cavities inside your skull, the ones anatomy textbooks called evolutionary leftovers for a hundred years, are not empty and not useless.

The lining of those sinuses contains an enzyme called inducible nitric oxide synthase. It runs continuously. It produces large amounts of nitric oxide gas. That gas sits in your nasal cavity at concentrations hundreds of times higher than anywhere else in your body.

The Karolinska team measured it. Air leaving the nose contains roughly 56 parts per billion of nitric oxide. Air leaving the mouth contains 14. Air leaving the trachea, below both, contains 6. The nose is the only factory.

Then they ran the experiment that changed sports medicine.

When you inhale through your nose, that nitric oxide rides the airstream down into your lungs. It hits the small blood vessels surrounding your alveoli and forces them to dilate.

More blood flows past more oxygen, and more oxygen crosses into your bloodstream. The exact figure they measured was an 18% increase in arterial oxygen uptake compared to mouth breathing the same air.

Same lungs. Same oxygen in the room. Same heart rate. One nostril of difference and your blood is carrying nearly a fifth more fuel.

The reverse is what should haunt anyone who mouth breathes at night.

Mouth breathing bypasses the sinuses entirely. The nitric oxide never enters the lungs. Pulmonary blood vessels stay constricted. Less oxygen crosses into the blood.

The heart has to pump harder to deliver the same oxygen to the same tissues. A 2008 review in the Anatomical Record showed mouth breathers develop measurably higher pulmonary artery pressure over time, simply because the gas designed to lower it never arrives.

There is a second finding most people miss.

Nitric oxide is antimicrobial. It directly inhibits the replication of viruses and bacteria in the upper airway. During the COVID pandemic, researchers in the European Journal of Pharmacology proposed that habitual mouth breathers were getting hit harder partly because they had bypassed the body's first chemical line of defense. The nose was not just a filter.

It was a chemical weapons factory aimed at every pathogen trying to reach the lungs.

The implication is the part that should change how you sleep tonight.

Your body built a free 18% oxygen upgrade and a free antiviral system into the same organ. Both only activate when air passes through your nose. Both shut off the moment your mouth opens.

Half the adult population sleeps with their mouth open and has no idea they are running their lungs at 82% capacity for a third of their life.

The fix costs nothing. A strip of tape across the lips at night. That is the entire intervention.

The most expensive thing in human performance is the oxygen you already paid for and never absorbed.

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@danielgothits @Indian_Bronson If the population grows

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@sweatystartup Energy is relatively infinite compared to how much we are using currently

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@alex_fasulo How do the leach heavy metals they’re made of aluminum and silicon

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@lukas_m_ziegler I mean if we can have awesome marble sculpures in every city around the world, not just rome, that would be pretty cool.

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@MarioNawfal Waiting till you can wakesurf behind them. doesn't seem that fun without a wave to ride.

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@StormDirac @sp3cul8r looks like the 13F still hasn't been published? https://t.co/yJntduNW6J

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@deedydas Same shit different day. SF felt similarly ten years ago in the wake of cloud computing

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@kevinolearytv Massive if true

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@YeshuaAdam @WallStreetApes https://t.co/KfXBXxYDAM

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@jakeglmn got a link to the study?

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

Very interesting... would like to see the linked study.

[Jake Gilman @jakeglmn]

Scientists gave 200 married couples a voodoo doll of their spouse.

They were told to add a pin every time their spouse annoyed them.

After 6 weeks, one measurement predicted who stabbed it the most.

And it had nothing to do with their relationship... (thread):

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@D_L_Moser @brionhickey @elonmusk I was in a different town a few weeks back and it was indeed not full of tourists.

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

Solid story

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.

He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.

Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.

Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.

Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.

Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.

Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.

The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@brionhickey @elonmusk Great, now it's going to be full of tourists.

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@niccruzpatane Amazing

[Ryan @rnpsc3]

@MattZirwas @annacorpron Nice. Thanks man.