u/d8_thc

Mark Kaplan was a 'supposedly' healthy, active 52-year-old tennis player when he had a heart attack on the court. By his doctor’s account, he was doing everything right. After the heart attack, he was told he'd need to take statins for the rest of his life, but they made him feel extremely sick to the point of wanting to take his own life.

That experience sent him down a rabbit hole trying to understand what had actually happened and whether he could improve his health naturally. He eventually turned everything he learned into an excellent book that breaks the subject down in a very readable way. He’s also extremely active on X, where he shares research, personal insights, and a lot of useful information about cardiovascular and metabolic health.

Image taken from his twitter: https://x.com/markkaplan20/status/2087951368653001072/photo/1

Highly recommend his book (I am not a shill): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H2C75R31

From the recent post about sun, I think it'd be a good idea to get a real discussion happening around sunscreen.

Caveat: Burning in the sun is very dangerous.

However, it’s probably very wise to use at minimum a mineral sunscreen, ideally zinc oxide based, over the older 'chemical' sunscreen filters like oxybenzone, avobenzone, octinoxate, octocrylene, homosalate and octisalate. These are your standard / average sunscreens, unfortunately.

Why?

Because many of these ingredients entered widespread use through the old OTC monograph system, based largely on their history of use, not through the kind of modern premarket safety process that people probably assume happened.

The FDA's updated review proposed classifying zinc oxide and titanium dioxide as GRASE, meaning generally recognized as safe and effective.

For 12 other commonly used sunscreen ingredients, the FDA said there still wasn’t enough data to make that determination:

FDA: OTC sunscreen orders and active ingredient classifications

That does not mean those ingredients have been proven dangerous.

It means the safety case is incomplete.

On top of that, FDA sponsored randomized trials found that several common sunscreen ingredients enter systemic circulation at levels exceeding the FDA threshold that triggers the need for additional toxicology testing.

The ingredients included oxybenzone, avobenzone, octocrylene, ecamsule, homosalate, octisalate and octinoxate.

2019 JAMA randomized trial

2020 JAMA randomized trial

Again, systemic absorption does not automatically equal harm.

But 'we detected it in the blood' and 'we have conclusively established its safety under decades of repeated exposure' are two completely different statements.

So yes:

Understudied.

And proving a small long-term harm after decades of population wide use would be extraordinarily difficult.

Even if one of these ingredients modestly increased some health outcome, most of the available evidence would necessarily be retrospective and observational, with an incredible number of confounders.

For one, sunscreen use is correlated with sun exposure.

Sun exposure is correlated with geography, skin type, outdoor activity, income, travel, clothing, occupation, healthcare access and screening behavior.

Separating all of that cleanly after the fact is hard science.

None of this is an argument to burn yourself or abandon sun protection.

Important distinction: this is about the older common U.S. chemical filters, not a claim that every non-mineral UV filter is inherently unsafe. The FDA recently classified bemotrizinol as GRASE after reviewing its safety data and low systemic absorption:

FDA approval of bemotrizinol, June 2026

Try it here

Buckminster Fuller knew that the gravitational field would ultimately be described by very simple geometry:

>The vector equilibrium is the true zero reference of the energetic mathematics… the zerophase of conceptual integrity inherent in the positive and negative asymmetries that propagate the differentials of consciousness.” - Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics

>The gravitational field will ultimately be disclosed as ultra high­ frequency tensegrity geodesic spheres. Nothing else.” - Buckminster Fuller

You can see a demonstration of what this means in the Vector Equilibrium / Cube-Octahedron geometry above. It has the unique ability to 'jitterbug' or oscillate toroidally. Expansion and contraction, radiation and gravitation.

Nassim Haramein fractalizes this geometry with the 64 tetrahedron matrix (seen above), which is two 'octaves' of nested vector equilibrium. Each with the ability to jitterbug.

Imagining this shape scaling from cosmological to Planck scales reveals jitterbugging geometries made of jitterbugging geometries, leading to a fractal toroidal boundarized spin model. Toroidal systems made of toroidal systems made of toroidal systems. Electrons toroidally flowing in atoms toroidally flowing in planets toroidally flowing in solar systems toroidally flowing in galaxies toroidally flowing in superclusters toroidally flowing in the Universe.

Microtubules are tiny structural proteins inside cells, including neurons. They are made from repeating tubulin dimers that form hollow cylindrical tubes about 25nm wide. In mainstream biology, they help with cell structure, intracellular transport, cell division, and organization. But they are also highly ordered, electrically polar protein lattices embedded throughout neurons, which raises a deeper question: are they only scaffolding, or could they also participate in information processing?

This is where Orch OR — Orchestrated Objective Reduction — comes in. It was developed by Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist and Nobel Prize winner, and Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist and consciousness researcher whose work focuses on microtubules, anesthesia, and Orch OR. Penrose brought the idea that consciousness may involve non-computable physics. Hameroff brought the biological candidate: microtubules inside neurons. Together, they proposed that conscious moments may arise from organized quantum processes in microtubules, coordinated by neural activity.

The interesting part is the orchestration. In this view, microtubules are not random molecular scaffolds. Their repeating lattice could support correlated state changes, collective oscillations, exciton movement, or other quantum-adjacent dynamics across many tubulin units. That could allow information to be integrated below the level of neuron firing — maybe even with nonlocal or field-like correlations across the structure. Some recent work on tryptophan networks in microtubules has reported electronic energy migration and superradiance-like behavior in these ordered biological architectures.

This makes anesthetics fascinating. General anesthetics can reversibly erase conscious experience. You do not die. Your neurons do not all stop functioning. Many unconscious processes continue. But the experienced world disappears. In the microtubule / Orch OR frame, anesthetics may not just be "sedating the brain" in the normal sense — they could be blocking the antenna, or disrupting the coherent substrate that lets the organism tune into / organize conscious experience.

Plants make this even weirder. You can anesthetize plants. Venus flytraps, Mimosa, sundews, and pea tendrils lose touch-induced or autonomous movement under anesthetics, and in Venus flytrap, diethyl ether can block action potentials. That does not prove plants are conscious. But it does show anesthetics interact with very ancient bioelectric and cellular machinery, not just mammalian brain circuits.

And there are studies pointing directly at microtubules. Anesthetics like etomidate and isoflurane have been shown to reduce exciton diffusion in microtubules. Molecular modeling suggests volatile anesthetics can bind in tubulin pockets. And a 2024 rat study found that stabilizing microtubules with epothilone B delayed isoflurane-induced unconsciousness. In other words: interfere with the microtubule system, and you may change how anesthesia turns consciousness off.

That is why anesthetics may be one of the cleanest windows into consciousness. The question is not only which receptor does the drug bind? It is: what physical process disappears when experience disappears, and returns when experience returns?

If anesthetics disrupt coordinated microtubule activity, then they may be pointing at a deeper layer of consciousness research — where biology, quantum chemistry, fields, and information processing all meet.

[Help from GPT for formatting]