Varsha Ajmera

fmr Chief Operations Officer at World Youth Foundation, NGO Rep. UN-DPI #youthdevelopment #speaker #leadership #strategist #SDGs. Tweets are my own.

[Varsha Ajmera @wrldyth]

https://t.co/TwMPHlFIVH

[Varsha Ajmera @wrldyth]

Welcome to #Malaysia

[UN Sustainable Development Group 🇺🇳 @UN_SDG]

We are happy to announce that @UN 🇺🇳 chief @antonioguterres has appointed Nikolas Myint to lead @UNinMalaysia 🇲🇾, Singapore 🇸🇬 & Brunei Darussalam 🇧🇳.

We look forward to working with him and his team to advance the #GlobalGoals 🌍 & #LeaveNoOneBehind.

⏩ https://t.co/fC6ES5vRM6

[FAO Livestock @FAOLivestock]

Join global leaders, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners at the @FAO Global Conference for Actions on One Health in Agrifood Systems

21–23 September 2026 in Rome

Be part of shaping solutions that connect human, animal, plant and ecosystem health
https://t.co/8XoisegMMG

[UNDP Planet @UNDPplanet]

Cigarette butts are the most littered plastic item on the planet.

Polluters must be held accountable.

Learn which other plastics are hiding in plain sight 👇 https://t.co/FysCpBT7Ex #NoTobacco

[The Telegraph @Telegraph]

A cancer vaccine used on the NHS eradicated tumours in “unprecedented” trial results.

Researchers found the jab, which was used on 102 patients with head and neck cancers, shrank the tumours in more than a third of patients and eradicated them in 15 patients.

🔗: https://t.co/ANoaKYCHAs

[Volker Türk @volker_turk]

The risks posed by social media to children’s safety stem from platform design and practices that prioritize profit at all costs. Addressing them through regulation and human rights can take us further than blanket bans.
More in my Office's new guidelines:
https://t.co/PI1LHO6YSa

[The Independent @Independent]

Millions of breast cancer patients could avoid chemotherapy with new genome test https://t.co/pU3qa9vTjK

[Varsha Ajmera @wrldyth]

Take the quiz and test how well you know the world’s forest. 🌳

[FAO Forestry @FAOForestry]

How well do you know the world’s forests? 🌍🌳

Take the new quiz on FAO’s eLearning Academy and earn your #FRA2025 certification by mastering the terminology and insights behind the Global Forest Resources Assessment!

👉 https://t.co/K1l7WcpdJ0

[Varsha Ajmera @wrldyth]

This model is overloaded right now. Please try again shortly or pick a different model. @grok . What’s happening the last few days I keep receiving this reply after one prompt!

[Varsha Ajmera @wrldyth]

The cooling power of trees. Stop cutting trees, they are life savers.

[World Resources Institute @WorldResources]

🌳😌🌇The cooling power of trees starts with shade.

When surfaces like pavement, rooftops and buildings are exposed to direct sunlight, they absorb and store heat, releasing it back into the air long after the sun goes down. Trees interrupt that process. They shade sidewalks, streets and people, preventing surfaces from heating up in the first place. They also cool the surrounding air through evapotranspiration, the release of water vapor from leaves.

Learn more about the cooling potential of urban trees➡️ https://t.co/bUGls96O6L

[Varsha Ajmera @wrldyth]

#laughter - the best medicine

[Victoria Byrne @Thevictoria76]

Look at this! Our genius dog watching Olympics diving and standing up like he’s about to compete 😂🏊‍♂️

Pipi’s Olympic dreams are next level! 🐶❤️

[Varsha Ajmera @wrldyth]

A child somewhere near you is online right now — navigating spaces that were not designed with their safety in mind.

Digital Crossroads – AI and Youth Safety 📅 Tuesday, 26 May 2026 ⏰ 4.00 pm. KL Time (GMT +8) 💻 Online via Zoom

🔗 Register here: https://t.co/Roi9PDhIIQ

[Varsha Ajmera @wrldyth]

Be #joyful

[Kylie Riordan @mindfulheal]

This

[Tuleyome @tuleyomeorg]

Today is the International Day for Biological Diversity.

Biodiversity supports resilient ecosystems, healthier communities, and a stronger climate. Tuleyome works to protect the landscapes that allow plants, wildlife, and people to thrive together.

[Varsha Ajmera @wrldyth]

Why #emotionalsafety is important

[Tiny Buddha @tinybuddha]

Emotional safety changes human biology more than most people realize...

[Varsha Ajmera @wrldyth]

The act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

When you write by hand, your brain lIt’s up everywhere at once.

#writing

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Varsha Ajmera @wrldyth]

Happy Teacher’s Day.

Thank you for continuing to inspire excellence, nurture future leaders, and transform lives.

[Varsha Ajmera @wrldyth]

Submit your ideas for the largest global ocean innovation award.

#ocean #innovation

[UN Ocean Decade @UNOceanDecade]

Applications are open for the OceanLove Innovation Awards — the largest global ocean innovation award!

Submit your idea to better protect the ocean to win:
🏆 Funding up to $10,000
🎓 The opportunity to attend a global bootcamp

🔗 Apply by 31 August: https://t.co/YuODxBI0Fi

[Varsha Ajmera @wrldyth]

Are you a young filmmaker?🎬

🎦Send a video illustrating your views on migration, diversity, social inclusion, and the prevention of xenophobia to the #PLURALplus26 Youth Video Festival!

🗓️Deadline: 30 June 2026
🌐Enter here: https://t.co/DgFpWzHNbr

[Varsha Ajmera @wrldyth]

Register now.
#digitalsafety #digitalsecure #youth #youngpeople

[Varsha Ajmera @wrldyth]

Register is now open.

DIGITAL CROSSROADS – AI AND YOUTH SAFETY

📅 26 May 2026 @4.00 p.m. Kuala Lumpur time 
💻 Online Webinar
🎟 Limited to 100 participants only
Secure your seat early.
🔗 https://t.co/Roi9PDhIIQ

#DigitalCrossroads #YouthSafety #AISafety #CyberSafety