WalterWX

It is simply incredible: During large-scale NATO exercises on the strategically vital Swedish Baltic island of Gotland, Ukrainian drone pilots—acting in the role of the aggressor—repeatedly and completely "annihilated" the Swedish (and, by extension, NATO) troops. The exercises had to be halted three times because, under real-world conditions, the Swedish units would have already been eliminated. Pilots using the call signs "Tarik" (1st "Azov" Corps) and "Karat" reported that while the Swedish troops possess potential, they must massively improve their drone technology, tactics, and—above all—their understanding at the leadership level. Sweden’s Supreme Commander, General Michael Klässon himself, emphasized that all NATO armies urgently need to learn from the Ukrainians how modern drone warfare is conducted—noting that the "fastest way" is the direct adoption of Ukrainian experiences. Source: Reporting by the Associated Press (AP) news agency, which was on the ground (May 2026, during the Aurora 26 exercises). After more than four years of intense, high-tech warfare in Ukraine—featuring countless drone attacks, daily lessons learned on the battlefield, and thousands of documented missions—it is truly staggering that large segments of NATO apparently still fail to grasp the fundamental nature of modern warfare.

Your brain has a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing. When they stop, something dangerous is nearby. When they continue, the coast is clear. This wiring predates primates. These kids are being sedated by the oldest safety signal in the mammalian nervous system. The Max Planck Institute tested this in 2022 with 295 participants. Six minutes of birdsong reduced anxiety and paranoia with medium effect sizes. Six minutes of traffic noise increased depression by the same margin. The effect worked on people who had never left dense urban environments. Their bodies responded to a signal their conscious minds had never learned. King's College London ran a larger study. 1,292 participants, real-time mood tracking through a phone app, 26,856 assessments over three years. Hearing or seeing birds improved mental wellbeing for up to eight hours afterward. The effect held for people diagnosed with depression. Trees, plants, and waterways didn't explain it. The birds themselves were the variable. Now here's where Italy connects to Finland. 95% of parents in the Finnish city of Oulu let their babies nap outside starting at two weeks old. A 2008 study confirmed the children took longer, deeper naps outdoors. Parents reported letting them sleep in temperatures as low as -15°C. 66% said their babies were more active afterward compared to indoor naps. The practice started as a public health initiative from Nordic maternity clinics in the early 1900s and became cultural infrastructure. The Italian kindergarten in this video is running the same program the Nordic countries have been running for a century. Outdoor naps, natural soundscapes, no white noise machines, no blackout curtains. Meanwhile, American kindergartens have been eliminating nap time entirely to squeeze in more instruction. A UMass study showed that children who skipped naps forgot 12% of what they learned that morning. The nap itself was the learning. The irony is that the countries spending the least on sleep technology for children are producing the best sleep outcomes. No sound machines. No apps. Just birds.

Eli Lilly released retatrutide Phase 3 data yesterday. 28% weight loss in 80 weeks. The most powerful obesity drug that’s ever been tested. And today the cancer signal drops. 12,112 patients. Seven tumor types. GLP-1 users had half the lung cancer metastasis rate (10% vs 22%). Breast cancer: 43% cut. Colon cancer five-year mortality in a separate study: 15.5% vs 37.1%. Cancer joins a list that already includes heart disease (SELECT, 20% MACE reduction), kidney failure (FLOW, 24% slower decline), sleep apnea (SURMOUNT-OSA, FDA-approved), addiction (BMJ, 600K veterans, 18-25% reduction across substances), and liver disease (86% fat clearance). Tumors express GLP-1 receptors. Activate them and NF-kB drops, apoptosis rises. The drug isn’t just shrinking fat. It’s talking directly to the cancer. One drug class. Designed for blood sugar. The biology keeps finding uses the designers didn’t predict.

Toru Miyazaki gave 11 cats with advanced kidney disease an experimental injection. 15 others didn’t get it. A year later, 9 of the 11 treated cats were alive. Only 3 of the 15 untreated cats survived. He just filed for approval, and the drug fixes a defect only cats have. Most cats die from one thing: their kidneys fail. By age 10, 4 in 10 cats already have chronic kidney disease, and by age 15, the rate doubles to 8 in 10. Once diagnosed, a cat has about 2 years left. The reason kidney disease hits cats so hard is a broken protein in their blood. All mammals carry a protein that helps the kidneys clean out waste. In humans and dogs, the protein floats freely and goes to work when the kidneys are in trouble. In cats, it stays stuck to another protein and can’t get loose. So the waste piles up, and the kidneys eventually give out. Miyazaki originally found the protein in 1999, back when he was at the University of Tokyo. He figured out the cat-specific glitch in 2015. The paper he published in the Veterinary Journal in February laid out the trial. The injection is a working version of the missing protein. His company, the Institute for AIM Medicine, filed the approval paperwork with Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture on April 24, 2026. If the review clears, the drug goes on sale in spring 2027. The 30-year lifespan figure in the tweet is Miyazaki’s own projection of what cats could reach without kidney disease. The trial only ran a year, and the average cat today lives 15. Most die from the same disease this injection treats. The research almost died in 2020. After running out of funding during COVID, Miyazaki went public. Cat owners across Japan responded by sending in 300 million yen, around 2 million dollars total. He resigned from the University of Tokyo and worked on the drug full time. The treatment in front of regulators today exists because cat lovers refused to let the research die.

A neurobiologist at Columbia spent 30 years proving that the gut has its own brain, and the day he finally published the book that named it, almost every psychiatrist in America stopped returning his calls. His name is Michael Gershon. He runs the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, and the field he built from the ground up is called neurogastroenterology in short brain-gut axis. The book that announced it to the world was published in 1998, and the title alone tells you everything about what he was up against. He called it The Second Brain. The claim sounded like science fiction in the 1990s. Gershon was saying that the human gut contains its own fully functional nervous system, with around 100 million neurons embedded in the walls of the alimentary canal, which is the nine-meter tube running from your esophagus to your anus. That is more neurons than your entire spinal cord, and more than your entire peripheral nervous system put together. The gut was not just digesting food. It was running its own intelligence, with its own reflexes, its own memory, and its own way of deciding what to do without asking the brain in your head for permission. The medical establishment treated this as borderline heretical when he first started publishing it. The brain was supposed to be the command center. Everything else was supposed to be the periphery. A second brain in the belly did not fit the architecture anyone had been taught. Then the data started piling up, and it was impossible to argue with. The first finding that broke the old model was about serotonin. You might have heard Andrew Huberman talking about it on his podcasts. Serotonin is the neurotransmitter associated with mood, well-being, sleep, and depression. Every antidepressant on the market targets it. The assumption for decades was that serotonin was a brain chemical, produced in the brain, regulated in the brain, and responsible for what happened inside the brain. Gershon's lab showed that 90 to 95 percent of the body's serotonin is not produced in the brain at all. It is produced in the gut, by specialized cells called enterochromaffin cells embedded in the intestinal lining. Your stomach and intestines are the largest serotonin factory in the human body, and the brain in your skull is producing only a tiny fraction of what is circulating below your neck. The second finding was even harder to swallow. The vagus nerve is the longest cranial nerve in the body, running from the base of the brain down through the neck, the chest, and into the abdomen, where it branches into the gut. For most of the 20th century, doctors assumed the vagus was the brain's way of giving orders to the digestive system, in the same way the brain gives orders to the rest of the body. The actual measurements showed almost the opposite. Roughly 90 percent of the fibers in the vagus nerve are carrying signals upward, from the gut to the brain, and only a small fraction are carrying signals downward. Your gut is sending nine times more information to your head than your head is sending to your gut. The bandwidth is wildly asymmetrical, and almost all of it is going in a direction the medical textbooks had quietly been wrong about for decades. The implication of those two findings together is what changed psychiatry. If most of your serotonin is being produced in your gut, and most of the information flowing through your vagus nerve is moving from your gut to your brain, then your mood is being shaped from the bottom up far more than it is being directed from the top down. The feeling of dread before a difficult meeting. The sudden clarity after a good meal. The low-grade anxiety that will not go away no matter how much you talk through it. All of it is downstream of signals that started below your diaphragm. A 2019 study at McMaster University put the final piece in place. Researchers gave mice oral antidepressants and watched what happened. The drugs activated the vagus nerve from the gut side, and the gut-to-brain signaling was what produced the antidepressant effect. When they cut the vagus nerve and tried the same drugs, the antidepressant effect disappeared completely. The drug was not working on the brain directly. It was working on the gut, and the gut was working on the brain. The follow-up research on the microbiome made the connection even tighter. Mice raised in completely sterile environments with no gut bacteria produced about 60 percent less serotonin in their intestines than normal mice. When the bacteria were reintroduced, serotonin production returned to normal. The trillions of microorganisms living in your digestive tract are not passengers. They are running the factory that makes the chemical your antidepressant is trying to manipulate. The most haunting line from Gershon's interviews is the one I keep coming back to. He said the second brain does not do philosophy or poetry, and it cannot help you write a novel. But it is the brain that decides whether you wake up in the morning feeling like the day is full of possibility or feeling like something is wrong before anything has even happened. The mood you assume your conscious mind is generating from your thoughts is mostly being generated underneath you, by a nervous system you cannot feel and cannot consciously access, in an organ you have spent your entire life thinking about as a digestion machine. The decision your gut makes about how you are going to feel arrives in your head a fraction of a second before your brain catches up to it. The conscious thought is the explanation your mind invents for a verdict that has already been reached somewhere lower. You did not feel uneasy because you were thinking dark thoughts. You started thinking dark thoughts because your gut was already uneasy.

I explained the Chinese real estate & debt crisis in much detail in 2024 on my Substack. Nothing has changed since. China is in what we call "the largest balance-sheet recession the world has ever seen". And it will take years to get out of it and assuming the CCP's investment-led growth model does not dig the next hole in the meantime - a likely. The FT published added some colour to it two days ago: "Housing is important to every economy. But to China, it’s extra important. According to the PBoC, 96% of urban households own a home, and 41% own at least two. The average household owns 1.5 properties. And as such, property constitutes around 70% of China’s private wealth. The comparable figure for the US is around 30%. So when Chinese property prices fall, the authors make a pretty compelling case that this has all sorts of particularly bad economic spillovers. And fall they have. The negative wealth effect is substantial, and “effects are amplified by elevated household debt, much of which consists of mortgage obligations”. This — and the weaker income expectations that the falls generate — goes some way to suppressing consumption. Moreover, declining land-sale revenues constrain local government budgets, “limiting their capacity to finance developmental projects and maintain existing public infrastructure”. And this is even before any credit impacts from rising non-performing loans and mortgages on bank balance sheets are considered. Tl;dr: bad bad bad. Of course, China isn’t the first soon-to-be-global-economic-hegemon-East-Asian-power staring down demographic oblivion to have piled its savings into a property boom. Back in 1991, the world was fretting over the rise and rise of Japan. And the Japanese were buying Japanese residential real estate at outlandish prices. Japan’s house prices peaked back in 1991 and spent the next 30 years on a downward trajectory. We’re only a few years into the Chinese property bust, and its ultimate trajectory is both unknown and unknowable. But Rogoff and Yang have pulled together some cool data they kindly shared with Alphaville, allowing us to make this chart below. So far, it looks like prices in Chinese cities are falling at around the same pace as they did over the first five-to-10 years of Japan’s bust. Japan’s property crash is associated with a lost decade (or two) of economic growth. In the 10 years leading up to 1991, Japanese real annual GDP growth averaged 4.4%. In the subsequent 10 years it averaged only 0.9% per annum. The same numbers for China, with 2021 marking its property zenith, are 7.0% per year and 4.6% per year (so far). If the IMF’s forecasts turn out right, this latter number will fall to around 4.0% per annum. While the levels are different, the before-and-after drop looks comparable. Was it housing wot dun it? Rogoff and Yang reckon that a 40% decline in house prices translates into a total consumption loss of 2-4% of GDP. Not nothing, but not a single answer explaining life, the universe and wiggles in the decadal pace of real economic growth. To get here, they construct a historical dataset comprising subnational data across 47 prefectures, and input and output data at granular industry levels. They then use this to examine the macroeconomic implications of Japan’s real estate bust. And the authors argue that: a housing bust can generate substantial adverse effects on the economy via real channels. . . . overbuilding during the boom can trigger a demand-driven recession with limited reallocation and low output. Unlike financial channels, which amplify shocks through leverage, bank balance sheets, credit constraints, or fire sales, real channels operate directly through investment, consumption, labour markets, or productivity. In Japan’s case, the housing market collapse depressed activity through three key real channels: investment, consumption, and sentiment. This is all pretty intuitive. But using city-level and household-level Chinese data plus some whizzy maths, they put meat on the bone for these three channels. They find that Chinese cities that overbuilt housing the most are less keen on new building, suppressing investment. Sounds legit. Chinese household consumption is estimated to be more responsive to house price changes than it was in either Japan or the US given its outsized role in private wealth. And it looks to the authors like people have scrambled to rebuild precautionary savings they thought they had amassed in property. Understandable. Then, on the sentiment side, Rogoff and Yang use an LLM to gauge market perceptions of the housing market. And by incorporating city-specific perceptions, they double the estimated effect of house price changes on consumption. Huh. While China is not Japan, 1991 was not 2021, and a *lot* of other things are/were going on, it’s interesting to see that the overall magnitude and pace of property price falls — as well as the aggregate drop in the pace of headline GDP growth — has (so far) been spookily similar. And as for the big question — are we there yet? "If China’s adjustment unfolds in a similar way as Japan’s, it would mean China has not gone half way through the transition. By contrast, if China’s path is eventually comparable to the United States, it appears to have already covered roughly two-thirds of the adjustment before reaching the bottom." So more to come.

This isn't AI, it's the Huajiang Canyon Bridge in Guizhou, China, the world's highest bridge at 625 meters above the river beneath it. It features a man-made waterfall created by diverting karst spring water discovered during tunnel construction.

🇨🇳 China built a 1.22M square metre train station on top of a mountain for $7.8B in just 38 months. The roof alone weighed 16,500 tonnes. They assembled it on flat ground, then hydraulically lifted the entire thing 57 metres into the air.

1902 Paris Beauty that never fades ✨