Yanchong Li

Coffee Overwhelming!! Founding AIgneous & Geophysics PhD @ UofI

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

Your brain has two cleaning shifts.

🌙 Sleep does one.
☀️ Your abs do the other.

Each ab squeeze pumps blood up your spine, micro-shifts the brain, flushes waste OUT — opposite direction from sleep.

Mice + sims (Drew et al. 2026, Nat Neurosci)

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

Full article with figures and sources (including the 3D mantle-flow diagram from our 2024 Nature Communications paper):

https://t.co/60JwBTUUKO

Happy Earth Day 🌍

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

11/ Why so fierce? When India slammed into Asia ~50 million years ago, it close up the big ocean in between - the Tethys. This creates a giant mantle leak. The pressure gradient of an entire half of the planet focused itself into that wound, jetting northward into Asia and sink down beneath Tibetan Plateau.

You walk on continents. Continents are being steered by rivers you'll never see.

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

10/ Now the "mantle wind" part.

Beneath Tibet, three hemisphere-scale mantle currents converge: one from Mongolia/Europe, one from the Pacific, and — most aggressively — one surging up from beneath the Indian Ocean.

That convergence is the reason the Himalayas exist.

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

8/ Earth's inner core sits at around 5,400 °C.
The surface of the sun is around 5,500 °C.

A sphere of solid iron the size of the moon, buried 5,100 km beneath your feet, is within 100 degrees of the temperature of a star.

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

9/ The deepest hole humans ever drilled (Kola Superdeep Borehole, USSR, 1970–1992) went 12,262 meters down.

Why did they stop? The rock was 180 °C — twice as hot as predicted. The drill bit softened. The rock itself turned plastic, flowing back into the hole between drilling sessions.

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

7/ Magnetic north isn't a fixed point. It's generated by churning liquid iron in the outer core, and it moves.

20th century: drifted ~10 km/year across Canada.
Now: racing toward Siberia at ~35 km/year (peaked at 60 km/year in the 2010s).

Aviation charts can barely keep up.

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

6/ The Amazon's soil is terrible — rain leaches nutrients away almost as fast as they appear. So how does the rainforest not starve?

It gets fertilized by the Sahara.

Trade winds lift 182 million tonnes of dust/year. ~22,000 tonnes of phosphorus lands on the Amazon. Exactly what's lost to runoff.

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

5/ Earth's atmosphere is leaking — about 90 tonnes per day, mostly hydrogen escaping to space.

This is the same process that killed Mars: weaker gravity, no magnetic field, atmosphere stripped by the solar wind over billions of years.

Earth is on the same road. Just much, much slower.

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

4/ "The Amazon is the lungs of the Earth." Mostly wrong.

50–80% of atmospheric oxygen comes from phytoplankton — microscopic algae in the ocean. A single genus, Prochlorococcus, produces ~20% of all Earth's oxygen on its own.

The Amazon forest is roughly net-neutral on O2.

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

3/ You weigh about 0.5% less at the equator than at the North Pole. A 70 kg person is 350 g lighter, no mass lost.

70% of the difference is centrifugal force flinging you outward as Earth spins. 30% is that the equator bulges ~21 km farther from the center of mass.

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

2/ Since 2020, Earth has repeatedly set records for unusually short days relative to atomic time.

The shortest day in recorded history was July 5, 2024 — 1.66 ms shorter than 24 hours.

If this continues we may soon need to do something unprecedented: subtract a leap second. A "negative leap second." First in history.

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

1/ Earth's day used to be around 22 hours. Then it got stuck at 19.5 hours. For 1.5 BILLION years.

Why? The sun's tide on the atmosphere was pulling Earth one way, the moon's tide on the oceans pulled it the other. They cancelled out. The clock froze.

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

Happy Earth Day!!

Most people think continents drift slowly — and assume the mantle beneath them moves just as slowly. A 2024 paper showed the opposite: the mantle actually moves faster than the plates, and there's a "mantle-wind black hole" under Tibet that's literally pulling India into Asia.

Oh, and it's my own work ;)

More Earth knowledge you probably don't know yet ⬇️

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

@mytechceoo @albertadevs @getaxal Employee in TIP:

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

I have over 2 years of Goodnote handwriting+photo mixed notebooks. Never cared to look into them again cus they’re chaotic. Thought I was gonna lose them.

This weekend I asked Codex to organize the notebook for me, it actually go through all of the rendered shot as well as the photos in original quality and give me a well organized page-by-page markdown. Now these notes are integrated into my knowledge base and can be easily retrieved.

This is wild

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

Sometimes it means a storm somewhere else hit a major hub, the FAA slowed arrivals, and the delay spread through the rest of the network. We broke down the mechanism here:
https://t.co/ee50kcafex

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

“Weather delay” doesn’t always mean your weather.
A flight can get weather delayed even if your airport is sunny.

[The FAA ✈️ @FAANews]

✈️Traffic Report: ⛈️ may cause delays at @DTWeetin, @fly2midway and @fly2ohare. 🌬️ could affect flights at @BostonLogan, @JFKairport, @LGAairport, @EWRairport and @PHLAirport. Low ☁️ forecast at @flySEA. https://t.co/teUeDe1gXx

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

@steipete @openclaw Would something similar to ralph solve the laziness problem?

[Yanchong Li @SpringMushrooom]

@thekitze Have had enough of this and changed to Hermes yesterday, working like a breeze