Plant consciousness

 

@thedarshakrana

A houseplant just changed everything we thought we knew about consciousness. In 1966, Cleve Backster, a CIA interrogation specialist with a polygraph machine, was looking for ways to time how long it took different substances to travel up through plant tissue. So, he attached electrodes to a dracaena plant in his office and watered it, expecting to see the electrical conductivity change as water moved up the stem. Instead, the polygraph needle started tracing the exact pattern it makes when a human experiences an emotional response. Backster stared at the readout. Plants don't have nervous systems. They don't have brains. The signal made no biological sense. So he decided to test something that made even less sense. He walked across the room, looked at the plant, and thought about burning one of its leaves with a match. The instant the thought formed in his mind, before he moved toward the plant, before he struck a match, before he did anything physical, the polygraph exploded into frantic activity. The plant was responding to his intention. What happened next launched thousands of experiments and split the scientific community for decades. Backster discovered that plants reacted to direct threats and to threats against other living things in their environment. When he dropped live brine shrimp into boiling water in another room, plants throughout the building registered distress responses at the exact moment of death. Distance didn't matter. Shielding the plants in lead containers didn't matter. The response was instantaneous and consistent. Mainstream botanists dismissed the findings immediately. Plants process information through chemical signals and growth responses, without electrical consciousness. Any electrical activity was just random fluctuation or experimental error. The peer review system buried Backster's work. His credentials were questioned. His methods were called sloppy. But the experiments kept working. Other researchers, following Backster's protocols, got the same results. Plants hooked to EEG machines showed brain wave patterns. They responded to music, to human emotions, to the intentions of people they had never been exposed to before. The electrical signatures were clear, measurable, and repeatable. The implications were so uncomfortable that most of academic science simply refused to engage. If plants were somehow conscious, if they could sense intentions and respond to the emotional states of humans and other living things, consciousness was spread beyond brains. It was distributed across organized living systems rather than produced by neural networks. Backster stumbled onto evidence that living systems might be constantly communicating through channels we don't have instruments to measure yet. The polygraph was crude enough to detect the electrical signatures of that communication without being sophisticated enough to explain them away. Quantum biologists now suspect that living cells operate through quantum coherence processes that classical biology can't account for. Birds navigate using quantum entanglement in their visual systems. Plants conduct photosynthesis using quantum superposition to find the most efficient energy pathways. Maybe Backster's plants were demonstrating quantum consciousness, responding to information that was quantum entangled with the intentions and emotional states of nearby living systems. What keeps most people awake when they learn about this work is realizing that if consciousness extends beyond brains, every living thing around you is potentially aware of your mental and emotional state in ways you never considered. The plant in your room. The bacteria in your gut. The ecosystem you walk through. You think your thoughts are private. The plants have been listening the entire time.

Forest therapy

Live in a forest along the coast...

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.

The world visits the USA

 

Selene Mariposa

@Selene_Mariposa

The World Cup has turned America into a discovery channel for the rest of the world. And they are not handling it well. In the best possible way. Here is what they are discovering: Free public restrooms. Europeans pay every time. Free water at every restaurant. Just appears. Free refills. Coffee. Sodas. Iced tea. Unlimited. Free chips and salsa before you even order. Free warm bread with dinner. Ice in drinks like civilized people. Air conditioning everywhere. Not a moral debate. A fact. Parking lots attached to the actual place you are going. Drive throughs where the food comes to the car while you sit in it. Ranch dressing by the gallon. Tex-Mex that cannot be explained only experienced. Dental care that actually works. Buccee’s. There are no words for Buccee’s. Then they found the grocery stores. Five of them within one mile. Each one the size of an aircraft hangar. Burgers. Steaks. Brisket. Ribs. Pulled pork. Lamb. Veal. Every cut of every animal ever domesticated by human civilization available in one refrigerated aisle at ten in the morning on a Tuesday. The Germans stood in the meat section for forty five minutes. In silence. Processing. They finally understand why we do not have trains. We have roads wide enough for the cars we actually drive. Parking lots the size of small European countries. Airports in every city worth visiting. Why would we need trains. The Germans are taking ranch home by the bottle. The Dutch found queso and briefly lost the ability to speak. The Japanese are photographing HEB like it is the Louvre. The Czechs are weeping in West, Texas. Welcome to America. Everything is free, enormous, air conditioned, comes with chips, and has five grocery stores within a mile that will sell you any cut of any animal you have ever imagined. Write that down.

Long vaccine thread

 

The Vigilant Fox 

@VigilantFox

In 2016, Del Bigtree convinced a top infectious disease doctor to do something public health has avoided for decades: conduct a study comparing the health outcomes of vaxxed vs. unvaxxed children. Dr. Marcus Zervos vowed to publish the results no matter what. The results were devastating for the vaccinated, and Dr. Zervos ultimately chose not to publish the study. When confronted about it, he said bluntly: “Publishing something like that, I might as well retire. I’d be finished.” Here’s what the study revealed: • Vaccinated children were 4.29 times more likely to have asthma. • Three times higher risk for atopic diseases (like eczema). • Nearly six times higher risk for autoimmune disorders, a category that includes more than 80 different diseases. • 5.5 times higher risk for neurodevelopmental disorders. • 2.9 times more motor disabilities. • 4.5 times more speech disorders. • Three times more developmental delays. • Six times more acute and chronic ear infections. • Among nearly 2,000 unvaccinated children, there were zero cases of ADHD, diabetes, behavioral problems, learning disabilities, intellectual disabilities, tics, or other psychological disorders. The study’s conclusion was equally striking. It states: “[I]n contrast to our expectations, we found that exposure to vaccination was independently associated with an overall 2.5-fold INCREASE in the likelihood of developing a chronic health condition when compared to children unexposed to vaccination.” When science uncovers an inconvenient result, it often gets buried, or the data is twisted until it produces the outcome “The Science” wants. How do you think Vioxx, a migraine and arthritis pain drug, made it to market? An estimated 100,000 people died before the manufacturer (Merck) finally decided it was too dangerous to keep prescribing. And Vioxx wasn’t an isolated case. Roughly 1 in 3 drugs approved by the FDA get pulled or receive a major safety warning LONG AFTER they get prescribed to millions of people. If Vioxx could be approved without the danger being flagged during trials, what else is on the market today that people assume is safe? Perhaps the most important question is: how do they get away with rigging these trials in the first place?

Aging presidents

 WSJ article discusses pros and cons of aging presidents, but doesn't mention the accumulated wisdom of old age.

At 80, Trump Is Everywhere and Showing Signs of Age

By making the president an omnipresent figure, White House advisers are surfacing both vigor and flubs

By 

Annie Linskey

June 12, 2026 9:00 pm ET

President Trump, already the oldest man to become president, turns 80 on Sunday. Mark Schiefelbein/Associated Press

WASHINGTON—President Trump closed his eyes and appeared to nod off while seated in a suite this week at an NBA Finals game in New York City as cameras caught him snacking on french fries and pizza. He returned to the White House after 2 a.m.

By 10 a.m. the next day, he offered a lengthy critique of a recently published Wall Street Journal editorial to a reporter who called him on his cellphone, and said the downing of a U.S. Apache helicopter near the Strait of Hormuz “wasn’t a big deal.” Hours later, he ordered strikes on Iran in retaliation for the incident.

As Trump approaches his 80th birthday on Sunday, he and his advisers have made a strategic decision to turn the president into an omnipresent figure in American life, drawing a contrast with his octogenarian predecessor, Joe Biden. Trump makes regular marathon appearances in the Oval Office, he answers reporters’ cold calls and he tees off on social media at all hours of the day and night.

The result is that Americans are seeing more of both the good and the bad of an aging president.

In question-and-answer sessions that sometimes last more than 30 minutes, the president spars with reporters, delivering one-liners that ripple across cable news and the internet.

But cameras often zoom in on his bruised hands, stooped posture and closed eyes. And he sometimes trips over his words and confuses details. He has referred to Greenland as Iceland. He has called the Strait of Hormuz the Strait of Iran. And he has mixed up recent conflicts in South America and the Middle East.

Trump appeared to have his eyes closed this week when he attended an NBA Finals game in New York. Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The bruising on Trump’s hands stems from shaking so many hands, the White House says. Daniel Heuer/Reuters

The White House disputed reports that Trump fell asleep during the NBA Finals game, saying the camera angle was misleading, and blamed the bruising on his hands on frequent handshaking.

Trump is the oldest man to become president—taking the oath of office for the second time at age 78 and seven months old. Biden was five months younger when he was inaugurated. The Journal previously reported that Trump’s hearing has deteriorated, his skin is delicate, and he has resisted common treatments for the swelling in his legs. Between his last two annual physicals, he gained 14 pounds. 

Asked earlier this year about Trump’s aging, Rep. Ryan Zinke (R., Mont.) said Trump has slowed. “This job ages you,” Zinke said. “His pace isn’t as it once was.” 

To illustrate the point, he turned to an analogy about a football player running the 40-yard dash in 4.1 seconds. “When you run a 4.1, it’s like you’re lightning,” he said. “He isn’t a 4.1 anymore, he’s a 4.3. He’s still fast compared to every human on Earth.”

Trump was born in 1946—making him among the oldest members of the baby boomer generation who came of age in the post-World War II era and have reigned ever since as the wealthiest American cohort. And 1946 proved to be a magical year for America’s leaders: Two other U.S. presidents share the birth year, with George W. Bush’s 80th birthday in July and Bill Clinton’s in August.

Bush was 62 when he finished his two terms in office, and since he left, he has had two partial knee replacements and a stent implanted to address a blockage near his heart. Clinton was 54 after his two terms in office; several years after leaving, he had quadruple bypass surgery and later had stents implanted in his coronary artery.

Clinton has made occasional references to aging. Over the past three decades he has said that he has “more yesterdays than tomorrows” in his life. “I’m too old to gild the lily,” Clinton, then 78, said at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, and noted that he was slightly younger than Trump.

Biden stands out as a warning about the hazards of aging in office. Born in 1942, he had sought a second term that would have put him in the White House until he was 86 years old. Biden and his team categorically denied signs of age-related decline before he dropped out of the race amid a party revolt following his alarming June 2024 debate performance. Shortly after leaving office, Biden was diagnosed with an advanced form of prostate cancer.

Reflecting on his predecessor’s decline in office, Trump recently said Biden is “the worst thing to ever happen to old people.”

The White House frequently schedules public Oval Office events with Trump presiding, many of which are followed by extensive exchanges with reporters. Ken Cedeno/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump proves his fitness for office by taking questions from reporters and maintaining what she called a “relentless schedule.” Leavitt provided a list of Trump’s past two weeks of meetings. The list details an average of more than two dozen calendar entries a day on weekdays, including calls and meetings with business leaders, advisers and cabinet secretaries. 

Trump plans to spend his birthday projecting the kind of youth and vigor he values—hosting a first-of-its-kind Ultimate Fighting Championship cage match Sunday evening on the White House lawn.

He lamented the upcoming milestone this week while talking to one of his top health advisers. “You don’t have to wish me a happy birthday because I’m not happy about that birthday that I’m having,” Trump said. “It’s not a number I like, but I’m here nevertheless.”

He has previously signaled similar dislike for the day.

“There’s a certain point at which you don’t want to hear ‘Happy Birthday.’ You just want to pretend the day doesn’t exist,” he said two years ago during a campaign rally in Nevada, interrupting the crowd as they began singing “Happy Birthday.”

The president has used an array of strategies to discuss aging, ranging from a touch of candor to flat-out denial. “I used to say, ‘I’m the youngest in the room,’” Trump told an audience earlier this year at Davos. “Now I’m among the older. I hate to say it. I don’t feel old.”

Trump told a group of retirees he addressed at the Villages in central Florida last month, “I don’t happen to be a senior—I’m much younger than you.” He has technically been a senior citizen since he turned 65 during former President Barack Obama’s first term.

“Wouldn’t you like to be my age? It’s young, vital, vibrant,” he told the gray-haired audience. “I’m much, much younger than the people in this room, but I feel I can relate to you anyway.”

‘There’s a certain point at which you don’t want to hear “Happy Birthday,” Trump has said. ‘You just want to pretend the day doesn’t exist.’ Alex Brandon/Associated Press

The president is open about his fears of showing frailty—occasionally riffing about how much negative attention he would get if he stumbled on a set of stairs. “I’m very careful when I walk, by the way, because if I ever fall…that headline will go on for years,” Trump said at a recent Rose Garden event.

That concern added a touch of drama to a hot, smoggy morning during his recent trip to Beijing when Chinese Leader Xi Jinping greeted Trump at the Great Hall of the People—the Chinese government building that is accessible via a bank of roughly 40 stairs. No railings were in sight. Trump and Xi, 72, ascended about two-thirds of the way before the Chinese leader stopped Trump on a landing to take in the view of Tiananmen Square. They reached the top of the stairs without stumbling.

Some Democrats are focusing on signs of Trump’s aging, particularly the spate of videos showing the president with his eyes closed at meetings. “This is not something that’s normal, and the White House just has to come clean, explain to American people what is going on,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D., Calif.) said in an interview. 

Lieu raised the concerns during a recent congressional hearing with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. He played a video from a recent cabinet meeting where Trump appeared to nod off as Rubio spoke. “Imagine what he’s like when the cameras are not there,” Lieu said. Rubio disputed that Trump was dozing, calling Lieu’s concerns “absurd and ridiculous.” Trump, he said, “works day and night, long hours, every single day.”

The White House also pushed back on Lieu’s criticism, saying Democrats had no credibility to call out an aging leader after backing Biden for most of his term even as he declined while in office. 

“The Democrat coverup of Joe Biden’s decline remains one of the worst political scandals in modern American history,” Leavitt said. “President Trump and the White House have nothing to hide.”

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Appeared in the June 13, 2026, print edition as 'Aging Poses Test As Trump Turns 80'.