A Danish scientist counted bugs on the same windshield, same road, same conditions, every year for 20 years. By year 20, 80% of the insects were gone.

In Germany, a group of volunteer bug scientists did something even bigger. They set traps in 63 nature reserves, not farms, protected land, and weighed everything they caught. Same traps, same method, 27 years straight. The total weight of flying bugs dropped 76%. In midsummer, when insects should be peaking, it was 82% gone. A follow-up in 2020 and 2021 checked again. No recovery.

In the UK, they literally ask drivers to count splats on their license plates after a trip. The 2024 count came back 63% lower than just 2021. Three years.

A 2020 study pulled together 166 surveys from 1,676 locations around the world. Land insects are disappearing at roughly 9% every ten years.

Here’s where it hits your plate. About 75% of the food crops we grow depend on insects to pollinate them, everything from apples to almonds to coffee. One 2025 study modeled what a full pollinator collapse would look like: food prices jump 30%, the global economy takes a $729 billion hit, and the world loses 8% of its Vitamin A supply.

Birds are already feeling it. North America has lost 2.9 billion birds since 1970. A study from just weeks ago found half of 261 bird species on the continent are now in serious decline, and the losses are speeding up in farming regions. The birds that eat insects lost 2.9 billion. The birds that don’t eat insects? They gained 26 million. That ratio tells the whole story.

One of the German researchers behind the 27-year study drives a Land Rover. He says it has the aerodynamics of a refrigerator. It stays clean now.

https://x.com/AnishA_Moonka/status/2035764759036121258

Part 2. So why are the bugs disappearing?

Almost every corn seed planted in America comes pre-coated with a pesticide called a neonicotinoid. Think of it as nicotine for bugs. It gets baked into the seed, and as the plant grows, the poison spreads through the whole thing, stems, leaves, pollen, nectar, all of it. About half of soybean seeds get the same treatment. In total, these pesticides cover around 150 million acres of U.S. farmland every year. That’s roughly the size of Texas.

Here’s the part that got me. The plant only absorbs about 2% of the pesticide on the seed. The other 98% washes off into the soil and water. A Penn State study found that 40% of farmers don’t even know their seeds are coated with it. The EU looked at the science, found “high acute risks” to bees, and banned three of the main ones from outdoor use in 2018. The U.S. still hasn’t. The neonicotinoid market hit $5.5 billion globally in 2023.

Pesticides aren’t the only problem. Streetlights are killing bugs at a scale nobody expected. UK researchers compared moth caterpillars near lit and unlit roads and found 47% fewer caterpillars near the lights. One German estimate puts the toll at 100 billion insects killed by artificial light per summer. And the new LED streetlights cities are installing to save energy? Worse for insects than the old yellow ones.

Then there’s the land itself. North America has lost 90% of its native grasslands. What replaced them is mostly single-crop farms stretching to the horizon, corn or soy with nothing else growing. For insects, that’s a desert with poison in it.

The EU banned the pesticides. The U.S. still sprays them across an area the size of Texas every planting season.

Went down the rabbit hole on this. Your brain treats a physical book like a landscape. It builds a spatial map of the text, the same way it maps trails, rooms, and city blocks. When you scroll on a phone, that map breaks apart.

Seven large-scale research reviews and direct brain scans confirm what you already feel.

A 2023 study in PLOS ONE attached brain-activity sensors to children’s heads while they read the same text on paper and on screen. Paper reading produced fast brain waves, the pattern linked to focused attention. Screen reading shifted the brain into slow waves, the pattern linked to mind wandering and daydreaming. Same kids. Same words. Measurably different brain states.

A separate 2022 study from Showa University in Japan scanned the front of the brain, the area that manages focus and comprehension, during phone versus paper reading. Smartphones sent that region into overdrive, meaning the brain was straining just to keep up with basic processing. Paper reading produced a moderate load that triggered natural deep breathing, which helped regulate brain function and sustain focus. The phone suppressed that breathing pattern entirely.

Since 2017, researchers have published seven major reviews combining hundreds of individual studies. Six of seven reached the same conclusion: people understand less on screens. A 2018 review of 54 studies and 170,000+ participants, literally titled “Don’t throw away your printed books,” found paper outperformed screens across the board for non-fiction. A 2024 follow-up with 49 more studies confirmed it. The gap has grown steadily every year since 2001. Being a “digital native” doesn’t help.

The best explanation is how your brain tracks where you are. Your short-term memory can only juggle about 7 things at once. A physical book gives you constant location cues: the weight shifting from right hand to left, where a paragraph sits on the page, how thick the remaining pages feel. Your brain hands off the “where am I in this text?” job to those physical signals, leaving more room for actually understanding what you’re reading. On a phone, every screen looks identical. Your brain has to track position and process meaning at the same time, and something gives.

A Norwegian eye-tracking study analyzing 25,000+ individual eye movements found screen readers processed text more shallowly. The students had no idea they were reading differently.

In 2019, nearly 200 reading scientists from 30+ countries signed an open letter warning that screen reading was degrading deep comprehension. Since then, Scandinavian countries, among the most digitized school systems on Earth, have started putting physical books back in classrooms.

https://x.com/AnishA_Moonka/status/2035735955156734143

Part 2. The weirdest part of this research might be that your phone lies to you about how much you understood.

A university in Israel ran a clean experiment. People read the same text on screen and on paper, then guessed how well they’d do on a test about it. Paper readers nailed their predictions almost perfectly. Screen readers overestimated by about 10 points. Every time. They walked away feeling like they got it. They didn’t.

That fake confidence is the real problem. Your brain uses that “I’ve got this” feeling to decide when to stop reading. If the feeling kicks in too early, you put the phone down before the information actually sticks. Paper keeps you honest. Screens don’t.

Here’s where it gets wild. A team in Norway gave 50 people the same 28-page mystery story. Half got a pocket paperback. Half got a Kindle. Same page layout, same words, same font, everything identical except what they were holding. After they finished, researchers asked them to arrange 14 events from the story in the right order. Paperback readers got the sequence mostly right. Kindle readers scrambled it. The researcher behind the study, Anne Mangen, thinks the answer is literally in your hands: when you read a physical book, you feel the pile of unread pages shrinking on the right and growing on the left. That’s a built-in progress bar your body tracks without thinking about it. A Kindle weighs exactly the same on page 3 and page 280. Your hands get nothing.

And this part is a little unsettling. Maryanne Wolf, a brain scientist at UCLA who has spent decades studying how we read, says the damage doesn’t stay on the screen. The fast, shallow skimming you train yourself to do on your phone starts showing up when you read paper too. Your brain gets so used to scanning that scanning becomes the default. Even with a paperback in your hands. Wolf argues that schools now need to teach deep, focused reading as its own separate skill, the same way you’d teach a kid a second language, because the phone habit is taking over.

Maybe the most telling data point of all: when you ask people in surveys which format they prefer for serious reading, 80 to 90% say paper. Your body figured this out before the research did.

Went down the rabbit hole on this. A Nobel Prize-winning immunologist noticed in 1907 that Bulgarian peasants were living past 100 at unusually high rates. His explanation: they ate yogurt every day. His name was Élie Metchnikoff, and he ran the Pasteur Institute in Paris.

His lecture made front-page news. Parisians lined up to buy Bulgarian curdled milk. Drugstores across Europe and the US started selling Lactobacilline tablets, basically the world’s first probiotics. But his original theory was partially wrong. The specific bacteria in yogurt (Lactobacillus bulgaricus) don’t actually survive in the human gut. A Yale researcher proved that in 1921.

Should’ve been case closed. It wasn’t.

In 2021, Stanford ran a clinical trial published in Cell with 36 healthy adults over 10 weeks. One group ate about 6 daily servings of fermented foods (yogurt, kefir, kimchi, kombucha). The other ate high-fiber foods. The fermented food group saw their gut bacterial diversity increase, which is one of the strongest predictors of overall health, and 19 inflammatory proteins in their blood dropped. Including interleukin-6, a protein tied to Type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and chronic stress. The high-fiber group? Zero of those 19 proteins decreased.

That same year, a Keio University and Broad Institute team studied 160 Japanese centenarians (average age: 107) and published in Nature. These centenarians had gut bacteria producing a bile acid called isoallolithocholic acid, basically a natural antibiotic so new to science it had never been described. It kills drug-resistant bacteria, including C. difficile, a gut infection that hits roughly 500,000 Americans a year.

A 2023 Nature Aging study of 1,575 people in China, 297 of them centenarians, found the oldest participants had gut microbiomes that looked younger than people decades below them. More bacterial diversity, more beneficial species, fewer harmful ones.

The yogurt meta-analysis data across 12 cohort studies: each additional daily serving is linked to 7% lower all-cause mortality and 14% lower risk of dying from heart disease.

Metchnikoff called it 119 years ago. Fermented foods reshape your entire gut ecosystem, increasing the diversity of bacteria living in your intestines, lowering chronic inflammation, and building a biochemical environment where your body fights off disease on its own.

https://x.com/AnishA_Moonka/status/2035155637659640233

I regularly do deep dives into interesting topics. Follow along → @AnishA_Moonka

Attaching all links, if you'd like to dive deeper →

1.Stanford fermented food clinical trial (Cell, 2021) - med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/…
2.Centenarian bile acid study (Nature, 2021) - nature.com/articles/s4158…
3.Yogurt and mortality meta-analysis (Public Health Nutrition, 2023) - pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36349966/
4.Chinese centenarian gut microbiome (Nature Aging, 2023) - nature.com/articles/s4358…
5.Metchnikoff yogurt history (Smithsonian Magazine) - smithsonianmag.com/science-nature…

Every additional minute your toddler spends on a screen, they hear about 7 fewer words from you. By age 3, they also make 5 fewer attempts to talk back and lose one back-and-forth exchange with a parent. That’s from a 2024 JAMA Pediatrics study that put speech-recognition recorders inside actual homes across Australia.

The 49% stat in this tweet is real. It comes from a 2017 study at SickKids Hospital in Toronto that tracked 894 children aged 6 to 24 months. For every 30 minutes of handheld screen time per day, the risk of a child being slow to form words and sentences increased by 49%. But only the speech output was affected. Gestures, body language, and social interaction were all fine.

The mechanism is displacement. A toddler’s brain learns language through something researchers call “serve and return”: baby babbles, parent responds, baby tries again. That loop is how the brain’s language wiring gets built. When a screen is on, that exchange drops off.

And we can now see it on brain scans. A 2020 JAMA Pediatrics study at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital scanned the brains of 47 kids aged 3 to 5. Kids with more screen time had weaker white matter, the insulation around nerve fibers that helps different parts of the brain talk to each other. The weak spots were in the exact areas that control language and early reading.

A 2023 study at Tohoku University in Japan followed 7,097 children from birth. More screen time at age 1 was associated with higher rates of communication delays at ages 2 and 4. Each additional hour widened the gap.

The AAP recommends zero screen time for children under 18 months, except for video calls. The average child under 2 already gets over an hour a day. But a 2023 systematic review found that when kids with speech delays stopped using devices for six months, 36.7% showed measurable improvement. The word in the tweet is “destroys.” The data says it’s closer to “delays,” and in many cases, delays that respond when the screens come off.

https://x.com/AnishA_Moonka/status/2033679151220330769

Part 2 on this because some of the other research is worse.

The “educational app” defense doesn’t hold up. children under 3 have what researchers call a “transfer deficit,” their brains cannot take something learned on a flat screen and apply it in the real world. A 2015 study at Georgetown and Binghamton gave 2.5 year olds a puzzle to solve, once on a touchscreen and once on a physical board. Same puzzle and live instructor both times. The kids who learned it on the screen couldn’t do it with their hands. That gap doesn’t close until around age 4.

So when an app says “educational” on the label for your 18 month old, there’s no regulatory body checking that claim. anyone can slap “educational” on a toddler app. A Penn State study found most top-downloaded kids’ learning apps scored low on actual educational quality, with free apps scoring even worse.

And it’s not just the kid’s screen that matters. background TV, the kind that’s just on in the room while nobody’s really watching, wipes out adult speech around the child. A Seattle Children’s Research Institute study put recorders on 329 kids aged 2 months to 4 years. every hour of audible television meant 770 fewer words from the adults in the room. The lead researcher, Dr. Dimitri Christakis, said adult speech was “almost completely eliminated” when the TV was on. 30% of American households report having the television on all day.

Separate study from Kathy Hirsh-Pasek’s lab: when a parent answered a phone call during a word-learning session with their toddler, the child learned zero of the new words. Same session and words, but the parent who didn’t pick up the phone, their kid learned them all. One interruption could lead to total wipeout.

Scale this up. The Australian LENA study found that at 36 months, based on the average screen time in their sample (just under 3 hours a day), kids were missing roughly 1,139 adult words, 843 of their own vocal attempts, and 194 conversational exchanges. Every single day.

The actual research is wild. Every time you push down a feeling, your brain has to choose between suppressing that emotion and recording what’s happening around you. It picks the suppression. The memory doesn’t get saved.

A 2000 Stanford study confirmed this: people told to hide their emotions while watching a film remembered far fewer details than people who just reacted naturally. Suppressing emotions uses up mental energy, and that leaves less brain power for saving new memories.

Brain scans show why. A 2012 study found that suppression quiets the hippocampus (your brain’s memory-recording center) right when it should be saving information. The two brain regions that normally team up to lock in memories stop talking to each other.

Over time it gets worse. Suppression keeps cortisol (the stress hormone) elevated, and cortisol shrinks the hippocampus. Chronically stressed people can lose 10 to 15% of its volume. Just three weeks of high cortisol can shrink the tiny connection points between brain cells by about 20%. The good news: studies show this shrinkage can partially reverse once stress levels drop. Not necessarily permanent.

A Finnish study of 1,137 older adults tracked over roughly a decade found that habitual emotion suppressors had nearly 5x the risk of developing dementia, even after controlling for genetics, smoking, obesity, and education.

There’s a better way to handle emotions that doesn’t cost you your memory. It’s called cognitive reappraisal: instead of bottling the feeling, you reframe what’s causing it. (“This meeting isn’t a threat, it’s practice.”) A 2003 Stanford/UC Berkeley study found reappraisers had more positive emotion, better relationships, and higher wellbeing. Suppressors got the opposite on every measure. And reappraisal carries zero memory cost.

The difference comes down to timing. Suppression kicks in after the emotion has already fired, so your brain is fighting its own response while simultaneously trying to record the moment. Reappraisal changes how you interpret the situation before the emotion fully activates. Same event, same person, but your hippocampus stays free to do its actual job: recording your life.

https://x.com/AnishA_Moonka/status/2030966385338192053

If you like breakdowns like this, I regularly do interesting deep dives. Follow along → @AnishA_Moonka

Attaching links, if you'd like to dive deeper →

1. Richards & Gross 2000 (Stanford, suppression impairs memory) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10981843/
2.Binder et al. 2012 (suppression reduces hippocampal activity during encoding) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22796982/
3.Lisko 2020 Finnish CAIDE study (suppression and 5x dementia risk) alz-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.100…
4.Katsumi & Dolcos 2018, U of Illinois (explicit/implicit suppression reduces memory) sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
5.Gross & John 2003 (reappraisal vs suppression, wellbeing outcomes) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12916575/

Top 10 prompts I use in Screener AI that do hours of research in minutes 🧵

Sharing as requested by many friends. Honestly, I should have charged for this. Steal this.

Pro Tip: Always use the Expert Intelligence feature. It's a bit slower and more expensive, but the depth of the answers is night and day. Prompt 1: The Earnings Quality Detector

"I want you to do a deep forensic comparison between the company's reported Profit After Tax and its Cash Flow from Operations over the last 5 years. Pull the exact numbers for each year side by side. For every year in which PAT grew while operating cash flow declined, stayed flat, or grew significantly more slowly than PAT, I want a full breakdown of the causes of the divergence. Specifically, did trade receivables grow faster than revenue that year? Did inventory levels spike relative to the cost of goods sold? Were there any changes in depreciation or amortization policies mentioned in the annual report? Were there exceptional or non-recurring items inflating profit? Did the company capitalize expenses that were previously expensed? Go through the cash flow statement line by line for those divergent years and explain every major adjustment between net profit and operating cash flow. Also, check the conference call transcripts—did any analyst question the cash flow situation, and how did management respond? If management gave any explanation for weak cash conversion, pull the exact context. Finally, calculate the cumulative PAT vs. cumulative OCF over the entire 5-year period and tell me what percentage of reported profits actually converted to cash."

Why this works: Profit is an opinion. Cash flow is a fact. This prompt doesn't just flag the divergence. It forces the AI to trace exactly where the cash is leaking. You'll catch aggressive revenue recognition, channel stuffing, inventory buildup before a demand slowdown, and policy changes designed to inflate reported earnings. The cumulative conversion ratio at the end is the killer metric. A company that reported 500 crores of PAT over 5 years but only generated 300 crores of OCF has a 60% conversion ratio. That missing 40% went somewhere, and you need to understand where.

Started a week ago, not knowing how to write a single line of code

I wanted to read the Bhagavad Gita daily, but couldn't find an app that felt right. So I built one.

Ended with a full iOS app live @10minutegita on the App Store:
→ 239 daily readings of the Bhagavad Gita
→ Original Sanskrit shlokas + transliteration
→ Verse-by-verse translations & commentary
→ Personal daily reflections
→ Streak tracking with calendar heatmap
→ Shareable verse cards with 8 gradient themes
→ Hindi & English bilingual support
→ Light/dark mode, adjustable fonts
→ Completely offline after download

Total cost: $200 Claude Max Subscription + $20 ChatGPT Pro Subscription + $99 Apple Developer fee
Lines of code I wrote: 0

Claude Code wrote everything. I just described what I wanted in plain English (non-technical background). Codex reviewed it. Now it's live on the App Store.

The barrier to building isn't coding anymore. It's just knowing what problem you want solved.

Links & Full Process in 🧵↓

Built with @AnthropicAI's Claude Code 📱 iOS App Store (iPhone & iPad): apps.apple.com/tr/app/10-minu…
🌐 Landing: am1403x.github.io/ten-minute-git…
👨‍💻 Code: github.com/AM1403x/ten-mi… (licensed)

If this is of value to you, I'd appreciate it if you downloaded the app & let me know your feedback. Process attached below

DM me if you want help building something similar.

1/ Network Orchestration, A moat

The business model of PDS 👕👖

They play the role of the Orchestrator: A platform that connects to & finds synergies among 1000s of local networks across the world to create collective value for the network & its stakeholders

H/T @Chins1729 👑

2/ It's hard for a traditional firm to move towards being a Network Orchestrator

X | From thinking about their firm → The whole Network
Y | From Management control → Empowerment
Z | Shift in Value Creation through Specialisation → Integration

High Entry Barrier 🚧

There's this perception that IDFC First Bank has only one leader, Mr. V Vaidyanathan

Let me put rest to this mistaken opinion.

A thread 🧵👇 1/ Madhivanan Balakrishnan, COO

MSMEs need to be connected to digital entrepreneurs

Using E-marketplace, GEMS, & GST, bankers are augmenting the underwriting with these

70-75% of the retail lending 100% digital: 4-4.5 lk loans/month (digitally)

OCEN 🚀

IRFC: Business Analysis 🚂

A Regulated Monopoly Lender with zero NPAs & growing faster than HDFC & ICICI Banks

I authored this on Dec 2021 when the stock was barely talked about, posting it today to improve my engagement numbers on Twitter ✨

A Thread 🧵👇 1/ History.

IRFC was established in 1986 as a dedicated market borrowing arm of the Indian Railways, registered with the RBI as an NBFC (Systematically Important)

But why do Railways need them, can't they directly ask for funds from the Ministry of Railways (MoR)?

Real estate stocks have taken a tiny hit due to the interest rate hikes

Zoom Out. This is just a minor blip in this cycle

If the cycle goes the way it has in the past, most of the companies can become 5-10x larger in the next 5 years

If it doesn't, you still double your money. 1/ From Godrej Properties Q2FY23 concall

Price acceleration (across all markets) is driven by the end consumer & not just investors. Interesting.

Strong execution from Sunteck Realty: Targeting a 1800crs TTM Pre-sales by FY23 end.

- $ 3.8 billion (30K crores+) is Est. Gross Development Value (GDV) of the upcoming project pipeline in the next 7-8 years
- 37 million sq ft Across 7 projects

Very Interesting! 1/ They have nearly 2000 crores unsold inventory as of the date

They are also planning to launch 6000 crores worth of projects in the next 18 months

If the demand scenario stays robust, the targets above should not be hard to meet

Target: Double Pre-sales every 2-2.5 years 🚀

Sridhar Vembu Interview 👑

1. R&D Spends >>> Marketing Spends (The opposite is unsustainable, the last year was a bubble)
2. They have always followed an organic process of building deep capabilities over time which allows them to build great products
3. They are investing in medical technology, EVs, Robotics, Network Equipments, AI & ML
4. Future of SaaS? The market is great, however, too many people are chasing it (We need a period of consolidation as no business wants to work with 10s of thousands of companies, only 5-10)

Glenmark Life Sciences is now a too-cheap-to-ignore story 🚀

7x TTM EV/EBITDA, Next year (FY24) -> it will be much lower!

The Narratives of
1. Glenmark's dependence on its parent company
2. The parent's past capital misallocation

will perish with the higher prices 🖋️ 1/ My notes from their IPO.

Looked interesting then, now with a 50% price correction; the risk reward is a lot better ✨

https://twitter.com/anisha_moonka/status/1419629965788663814

IDFC First Bank hits it out of the park: 1% ROA this quarter 🚀

The NPA goes lower, PCR goes up 🏦 1/ The retail engine has started to fire 🔥🥲, the ROA would have been much better if the Treasury losses weren't there.

One of my most-awaited letters to shareholders, Mr. Uday Kotak in FY22 AR is here.

The words of Asia's richest banker 🧵 1/ The word that has resonated the most with me, especially post-COVID is humility. Whether it is political leaders, central bankers, business leaders, or the householder, change is on us and at us

Aegis Logistics: Business Analysis

Supply Side Dominance is the vision: Will they continue to gain market share?

A Thread 🧵👇 1/ Before we go deeper, let us understand the LPG Industry better

a. Upstream: Exploration and Production activities
b. Midstream: Storage and transportation of crude oil and gas
c. Downstream: Refining, production of petroleum products and processing, storage, marketing.

Let's hear what Mr Sashidhar Jagdishan has to say in HDFC Bank's FY22 AR.

I personally am very excited about the future of the HDFC group, which is analogous to a bet on the future of India 🇮🇳🚀

A Thread 🧵 1/ With the period of uncertainty mostly behind us, I believe a more positive macroeconomic outlook dominates the executive agenda, across industries.

Reserve Bank of India FY22 Annual Report Notes.

A Thread 🧵👇 (RT if beneficial) 1/ Interesting Macro talk.

The near-term outlook is fluid, rapidly evolving, and extremely uncertain.

It will likely have a bearing on longer-term prospects, including exacerbating the scars of the pandemic, by deglobalization, financial fragmentation, etc.

"During the year, enterprises moved from thinking of technology-led innovation as a way of coping with pandemic challenges, to looking at it as a means of powering their growth and transformation, especially in the case of clients who had already moved to the cloud." ~TCS FY22 AR 1/ "We are very proud of the steadily expanding number of G&T deals in our order book because each such win represents market share gain for TCS from legacy consulting organizations that have traditionally dominated this space."

Sandhar Technologies: Business Analysis.

The Mutual Fund of Auto Ancillaries? Let's find out.

A Thread 🧵👇 (RT if beneficial) 1/ Automotive is a cyclical industry, due to a 4W/2W being a high-cost ticket item vs an average consumer’s salary (think booms & busts 👇)

What makes me interested currently? It’s the tough times (FY18-present), one of the longest downcycle in its post-liberalization history.