Ernest Kim, DC, LAc

Top Teams with the BEST Starter Synergy this Postseason… Knicks & Spurs Knicks: A+ 🔵Towns (Scorpio) 🔵Hart (Pisces) 🔵Anunoby (Cancer) 🔵Bridges (Virgo) 🔵Brunson (Virgo) Spurs: A+ 🔵Wemby (Capricorn) 🔵Champagnie (Cancer) 🔵Vassell (Virgo) 🔵Castle (Scorpio) 🔵Fox (Sag/Cap cusp)

Top Teams with the BEST Starter Synergy this Postseason… Knicks & Spurs Knicks: A+ 🔵Towns (Scorpio) 🔵Hart (Pisces) 🔵Anunoby (Cancer) 🔵Bridges (Virgo) 🔵Brunson (Virgo) Spurs: A+ 🔵Wemby (Capricorn) 🔵Champagnie (Cancer) 🔵Vassell (Virgo) 🔵Castle (Scorpio) 🔵Fox (Sag/Cap cusp)

Official playoff bracket I know ball

A neurologist said: “Stick out your tongue for 40 seconds — this removes cortisol faster than any pills and breathing exercises. Big Pharm is panicking:🧵

Finnish scientists trucked in real forest dirt and grass and laid it over the gravel at four daycare yards. They let the kids dig around in it for a month. The blood tests came back with changes the researchers hadn’t expected to see so fast or so clear. The study ran at ten daycares in two Finnish cities with 75 kids aged three to five. Four of the yards got the forest treatment: about a tennis court worth of soil and grass laid over the gravel, plus planters and peat blocks the kids could dig and climb on. Three others stuck with their normal gravel yards. The last three were daycares where the kids were already visiting real forests every day. After one month, the variety of bacteria living on the kids’ skin shot up, and the kind that helps train the skin’s immune defenses jumped the most. Their gut bacteria started to look like the gut bacteria of the forest-visiting kids. Their blood showed more of the immune cells whose job is to keep the body from freaking out at harmless stuff like pollen and peanuts, and overall inflammation dropped. The kids on the plain gravel yards showed none of this. Childhood asthma in the US doubled between 1980 and 1995. Food allergies in kids jumped 50 percent between 1997 and 2011, then jumped another 50 percent between 2007 and 2021. And peanut allergies in one-year-olds tripled between 2001 and 2017. The Finnish researchers think one of the reasons is simple: kids today don’t get dirty enough. 37 percent of American preschoolers now spend an hour or less outside on a normal weekday. Their immune systems are getting trained in environments stripped of the bacteria humans have always lived around. Aki Sinkkonen, who led the study, put it in plain words: “It would be best if children could play in puddles and everyone could dig organic soil.” The Finnish government is now helping pay for daycares across the country to make the same changes.

In 2012, French student Anaïs Bordier saw a YouTube video of an American actress, Samantha Futerman, who looked exactly like her. Anaïs looked into it and found they had both been born in South Korea on the same day, in the same year, and in the same city. The only difference was that Anaïs had been adopted by a family in France, while Samantha had been adopted by a family in the United States. She reached out online, and the two eventually took a DNA test. It confirmed they were identical twins, separated as babies and raised on opposite sides of the world without knowing the other existed.

⚡️Consciousness is almost impossibly rare. Matter spends nearly all of its existence unconscious. Burning. Collapsing. Scattering. Reforming. Orbiting. Decaying. Becoming rock, gas, dust, ocean, bone, blood, brain. Then, for one microscopic interval, it wakes up and says: “What am I?” That is the miracle. Not comfort. Not religion. Not sentimental awe. A terrifying anomaly. The universe can run without witnesses. Stars do not need to be admired. Galaxies do not need to be understood. Atoms do not care where they have been. The furnace burns either way. Then consciousness appears, and suddenly the whole thing has a mirror. That is what makes human life so charged. A person is not merely an animal trying to survive. A person is ancient stellar material entering a temporary state of self-awareness before dissolving back into the larger process. The atoms continue. The person does not. That is the knife. Your atoms may survive future stars, but “you” are this one configuration. This one pattern. This one window where matter can remember, choose, love, suffer, create, tell the truth, and look back at the fire that made it. So wasting a life is obscene because the opportunity is so rare. Most matter never gets a voice. Most atoms never get a name. Most configurations never wake up. This one did. The only line that feels slightly too narrow is “consciousness was the accident.” The colder and deeper read is that consciousness may be what matter becomes when complexity finally turns inward. No guarantee. No promise. No cosmic safety net. But also not a meaningless glitch. More like a threshold event: matter crossing into witness. The strongest final truth: You are not separate from the universe. You are the universe briefly becoming aware of its own fire. Then the fire takes you back.

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.

There’s something satisfying about grafting - taking a strong rootstock and giving it a better variety on top. One clean cut, a little patience, and you’ve created something new.