Sruthi

Engineer turned Interdisciplinary Researcher. Environment. Development. Waste. Sanitation.

[Sumana Roy @SumanaSiliguri]

My oped in the Hindu about the right to walk and how walking has been central to the creation of Indian modernity:

https://t.co/12ADpYtLmU

[Sruthi @sruthi_mp]

@darshanarajend @ICICILombard @BeshakIN have some good and unbiased insurance advisors. I have had good experience with them.
Wishing you a quick recovery Darshana.

[Sarthak Sidhant @sidhant_sarthak]

transparency needs to be accessible.
from today it is.

within the past 2 weeks, around 1 crore 66 lakh records were scraped from the government's CPP Portal.

The Nation's procurement database is now publicly available to all.

link below

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Japanese immunologist spent 20 years proving that the chemicals trees release into the air walk into your bloodstream, hunt down your stress hormones, and arm your immune system in ways no therapist or pharmaceutical has ever matched, and most of the data has been sitting in Japanese medical journals for two decades waiting to be translated.

His name is Qing Li.

He is a clinical professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo and the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine. The Japanese government has been funding his research since 2004, and the body of work he has produced is the reason forest bathing is now an officially prescribed clinical therapy in Japan and Korea.

The story actually starts in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries coined the term shinrin-yoku to describe the practice of slow, mindful walking in a forest. They did it for a practical reason.

Japan was urbanizing fast, stress-related illness was climbing, and the country had thousands of square kilometers of forest sitting unused. The idea was to give people a reason to walk into the trees... They had no idea what was actually happening to the human body during those walks until Qing Li ran the first proper experiment in 2005.

He took twelve healthy adult men on a three-day, two-night trip to a forest park. They walked for a few hours each day. Nothing strenuous. No prescribed routes or breathing exercises. They simply walked slowly through the trees, breathing the air, looking at the forest.

Li drew blood and urine samples before the trip, on the second day, on the third day, on day seven after returning home, and again on day thirty.

The numbers that came back from the lab were not what anyone expected.

The activity of a specific type of immune cell called the natural killer cell, which is the cell your body uses to hunt down cancer cells and virus-infected cells before they can spread, had jumped by roughly 50 percent during the forest trip. The actual number of natural killer cells circulating in the bloodstream had increased significantly.

Three different anti-cancer proteins that those cells produce, called perforin, granzymes, and granulysin, had all risen sharply. And the effect did not disappear when the men went home. The immune boost was still measurable on day seven and was still partially present on day thirty.

Two hours a day in a forest had upgraded the immune system for a full month.

Li ran the same experiment with women a year later and found nearly identical results. Then he ran it with a control group who took a three-day trip through an urban area with the same amount of walking, the same hotel quality, and the same diet.

The urban group showed no measurable change in natural killer cell activity at all. The forest was doing the work, not the vacation.

The mechanism turned out to be a class of airborne molecules called phytoncides. Trees produce these compounds to defend themselves against insects, bacteria, and fungi. Pine, cedar, oak, and cypress trees release them in particularly large amounts, especially in warmer weather and after rainfall.

When you walk through a forest, you are inhaling those molecules into your lungs and absorbing them through your skin, and once inside your body they appear to directly stimulate the production and activity of the very immune cells Li was measuring in his lab.

Roughly 50 percent of the health benefit of a forest walk, according to Li's data, comes from the chemistry of the air itself. The other half comes from what the forest is doing to your nervous system.

This is where it stops being only about the immune system and starts being about stress.

A separate Japanese research team measured cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, in 84 participants across 35 different forest sites. They drew samples before and after a 30-minute walk in each forest and compared them to control walks in matched urban environments. The cortisol levels of the people who walked in the forest were lower than the cortisol levels of the people who walked in the city by a significant margin. Their heart rates were lower. Their blood pressure was lower.

The activity of their parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part responsible for rest and recovery, had gone up. The activity of their sympathetic nervous system, which is the part that drives fight or flight, had gone down.

Then a researcher at the University of Michigan named MaryCarol Hunter ran the cleanest version of this experiment ever done. She recruited participants from a city and told them to take a nature pill three times a week for eight weeks.

They were free to choose the time, the place, and the duration of the nature experience, as long as it was outside, in daylight, and free of phones, conversations, and aerobic exercise. They sent her saliva samples before and after each session so she could measure cortisol changes accurately and rule out the normal daily drop in stress hormones that happens to everyone.

The result was that participants experienced a 21.3 percent drop in cortisol per hour spent in nature, with the biggest payoff happening between minutes 20 and 30 of the walk.

After that, the cortisol kept dropping, but more slowly. The threshold dose for measurable stress relief was just 20 minutes outside in something that looked and felt like nature.

What none of this means is that nature is a substitute for therapy or for medication when someone genuinely needs them. Therapy treats different things than a walk does, and Li himself has been careful in interviews to call forest bathing a complementary intervention rather than a replacement for clinical care.

But what the research has settled is that the human body has a physiological response to being among trees that operates on the same biological systems modern medicine is trying to reach with drugs and clinical protocols, and that response is fast, measurable, and free.

The strangest part of Li's work is the implication he keeps repeating in interviews. The average person now spends more than 90 percent of their life indoors. Their cortisol stays elevated. Their natural killer cells stay sluggish.

Their parasympathetic nervous system rarely gets a chance to take over. The system that was tuned by millions of years of life under a canopy of trees is being asked to run permanently inside a box made of drywall and screens.

Your body has not forgotten what it is supposed to do in a forest. It is waiting for you to walk into one.

[ਇਮਨਦੀਪ ਕੌਰ | Imandeep Kaur @ImmyKaur]

Internet we need your help, if you are on the train that left Birmingham at 18.16 and split to go half to Cardiff and half to Plymouth @CrossCountryUK. A blind lady’s bag got left going to Cardiff, it’s blue / black and has a blind stick attached, Coach F we think can you see it.

[Repair Cafe Collective India @repaircafebang]

Hi everyone! 👋

21st JUNE Sunday Repair Café KreuMakrspce,
We have registrations Borosil Rechargeable Blender Lifelong Moka Pot with few electrical repair requests
Participants like to learn soldering skills
Waiting for people to bring their broken items get help to fix them

[Sucheta Dalal @suchetadalal]

Dear @CMOMaharashtra @mybmc @AshwiniBhide when is the press conference to announce a Rs5000 fine for this illegal abomination and violation of human rights and child labour laws? @India_NHRC please act suo moto

[TheLiverDoc™ @theliverdoc]

Good morning! Just got to know this!

1/2 A whole government Ministry is unleashed on me - because I speak against unscientific practices and primitive traditional healthcare that can harm, I communicate scientific information for public and patients alike.

This was an official memo released during the Ministry of Ayush meeting on 12-6-2026 fully dedicated towards shutting down my social media presence.

Imagine - the people in this meeting were eating biscuits and drinking tea, paid for by the citizens of the country - to decide how to gag and shutdown a citizen doctor who educates people on medical science via social media.

Yesterday, my Instagram account was briefly hacked, but I got back control and removed unauthorized access within an hour.

The Article 51A(h) of the Indian Constitution outlines the fundamental duty of every citizen to develop a "scientific temper, humanism, and the spirit of inquiry and reform". Added during the 42nd Amendment in 1976, this non-justiciable directive promotes logical reasoning, critical thinking, and rationality.

The Ayush system is not scientific, it kills scientific temper, it does not promote the spirit of inquiry, it lacks logical reasoning, has the deadest version of critical thinking and none of its products and practices are rational.

The only thing that needs to be shut down, is an unscientific body like Ayush that goes against the Indian Constitution and wastes public tax money... and not me.

Also, please look closely at the person at the end, who is copied to, by the Ministry. His name is Vaidya K P Manikandan and he is the owner and founder of CNS Ayurveda Hospital, where children are treated for chronic conditions such as severe mental health disorders, autism and epilepsy (please see an official release from the hospital in the next post). One such victim of his was saved by my team (we reported it: https://t.co/eXeWt2n6N7) and he put a criminal defamation case against me and the authors (for publishing a scientific peer reviewed paper!) which was later "stayed" by the High Court of Kerala.

This has nothing to do with service to patients, but everything to do with protecting the business of alternative medicine (especially Ayurveda). These low life complaintants should be ashamed.

[Isabella M Weber @IsabellaMWeber]

France just voted to nationalize ArcerolMittal, once the world’s largest steel producer!

[Sumana Roy @SumanaSiliguri]

How many trees are there in the Mona Lisa? From Ways of Seeing to Ways of Treeing. My essay in the Indian Express today.
https://t.co/hUCbqxuPQn

[Sidhant Sibal @sidhant]

Statement by UAE based IOS Marine that operates MT Settebello, the vessel that was hit by US

"We unequivocally hold US Navy responsible"

"Its a human tragedy that resulted in loss of lives"

"Innocent lives have been lost"

"No affiliation with Iran or Iranian Oil"

[Iain Cameron @theiaincameron]

Such a sad photo. Two scientists on a remote island collect seeds from the last known example in the world of a type of tree, hoping to preserve it.

Imagine being beside the last known of anything in the world. A humbling experience

Photo and story: https://t.co/PwLMhe21w7

[Article 14 @Article14live]

This is an urgent message from our Founding Editor @samar11. If you like our work and want to see it continue, please listen and subscribe:
https://t.co/2XjoqhVGwO

[Satish Agnihotri @Satishagno3]

NFHS-6 data released yesterday

तुम इतना जो मुस्कुरा रहे हो
क्या इंडिकेटर छिपा रहे हो 😂😂

[Sarthak Sidhant @sidhant_sarthak]

CBSE has systematically rewritten its rulebook to favor Coempt Eduteck.

check out the blog.

[BehanBox @BehanBox]

1/ NEW: For 20 years, ASHA workers have held up India's public health system. For the Dalit women among them, caste shapes who will accept their care and how they are treated — and it’s gone largely undocumented. We spent six months changing that.

[Nilesh Trivedi @nileshtrivedi]

This Bangalore-based startup @dognosis is enabling 10x affordable early-detection of cancer and other diseases via ... dogs! 😮👏

[Ankit Mayank @mr_mayank]

This will blow your mind 🤯

Tribals in Madhya Pradesh are holding unique ‘Chitra Protest’ against BJP Govt for stealing their homes & forests

They are covering themselves in mud, holding hunger strike & acting like dead bodies for past 11 days

Their only demands — Land in return of land & proper rehabilitation

They have been living on the same land for 2000 years and suddenly they lost all rights? Really?

[Daniel Regha @DanielRegha]

Visa fees should be after visas have been approved, or at least refund the payment upon rejection.

It's only right. If you don't want someone in your country, DON'T TAKE THEIR MONEY.

[m rajshekhar @mrajshekhar]

Needless to say, all these dailies are run by very sharp people. And so, such misrepresentation is intentional. This might be India's biggest win from the last 12 years. Everyone's character has been exposed. A lot of new heroes. And mass of old, pious venerables exposed as duds.