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Axial twist theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_twist_theory
80•lordnacho•3d ago

Comments

ahartmetz•3h ago
The schematic illustrations are just adorable! Whoever did these, fantastic job.
qgin•1h ago
Just look at this distinguished gentleman

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/61/Fi...

bongodongobob•50m ago
It looks like brainrot material, I love it. This has some meme potential.
frozenseven•56m ago
Not gonna lie, those illustrations are a bit scary. Which makes it even better.
comex•56m ago
I found the illustrations confusing; I had to go over them and the accompanying text over and over before I understood what was being depicted.
riffic•2h ago
surgeon Francisco Torrent-Guasp determined the human heart to be continuous, helical muscular structure like a conch shell. maybe I've been the holofractal subreddit a bit too long because folks really seem to have a thing for the twisty toroidal vortexes there.
taneq•2h ago
Interesting! My pet theory about the crossover in the optic nerve is that it's the simplest way to get goal-seeking behaviour. Proto-eye activates, activates muscles on opposite side of body, organism turns towards activated proto-eye.

Fun speculation: Maybe we started with no crossover (which gives avoidance behaviour, keeping the organism free-swimming). This still works for a while as the axial angle between eyes and muscle groups increases, so there's no real penalty for having a bit of a twist. As the twist increases, it starts acting a bit like a discriminator, where we avoid small things less than large things, which seems good if we want to eat small things. Past 90°, we start spiraling towards things instead of away from them, which admittedly makes us crash into large things more, but we can chase moving things. Hunting has evolved!

admin_account•20m ago
That’s interesting! My mind always just assumes the reason is some “core” biological reason. I think contralateral wiring helps the brain manage signal sequencing while preserving evolutionary symmetry.

The spinal cord handles rapid reflexes (pulling away from a hot stove), leaving the brain for slower non-immediate tasks. By crossing nerves before they reach the brain a standardized delay is introduced, giving the brain a predictable offset to filter against. The optic chiasm follows the same logic.

And I think this is necessary to keep same-side brain-body pairs from over-optimizing (direct nerve connection from the right hand to the right brain hemisphere) their paths at the expense of balance, preserving biological symmetry.

OhMeadhbh•2h ago
When I see a seemingly "random" post on HN I always wonder if someone happened across some random bit of info and thought it so interesting they just had to share, or if there's some other bit of related news I haven't heard about. Did we just discover space starfish on Mars? I'm guessing I would have heard about that. Or did someone post a paper challenging axial twist orthodoxy? Guess I can google that.

But there's a delightful span between seeing someone post something on HN unrelated to AI, Cryptocurrencies or startups selling VS-Code extensions and the moment when I satisfy myself something outlandish (like space starfish) hasn't happened. During that time, all things are plausible.

[Edit. Which is not to say I disparage or discourage posting cool things you've found on the net. That's kind of what many of us are here for.]

mk_stjames•1h ago
One of the most delightful things involving reading HN is seeing a strange, context-less post in the morning, and then, later in the day or evening, coming across another piece of information- maybe a popular article on another website or a very popular youtube video- that then leads you to some research hole, possibly wikipedia'ing and following the older, linked sources- where you wind up on the exact page linked from the random post that morning and it becomes pretty obvious that you just retraced the exact steps that a like-minded individual had done earlier that day.

It's happened to me several times where I doubt it could be simply recency bias coupled with chance of topics, due to the specificity and narrow directed-ness of the graph.

parpfish•1h ago
same. it happens to me all the time on HN.

on one hand, i feel like this is a text-book example of the Bader-Meinhoff illusion [0].

but... there's an actual causal mechanism that could drive it.

show an interesting article to the HN crowd -> some subset of HN readers are inspired to go down a wikipedia rabbit hole and post some cool thing they found back on HN -> people that saw the original interesting post will not only see the related followup post, but they'll upvote it and cause event MORE to see it

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

adamjb•1h ago
>axial twist orthodoxy

My impression is that this isn't exactly settled science. If you look in the history for the article you can see that it's mainly written by the lead author of the main citations. He also did the cute illustrations that everyone loves

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Marci68

monkeycantype•1h ago
can you be my collective memory for a minute, I remember the existence of a very satisfying engineering explanation for why the representation of various body parts needs to be flipped left/right in the brain that came down to the topology of the wiring, and explained why unflipped isn't feasible / or perhaps it was just less efficient, it was one of those 'mind explodes' moments, but now I can't recall the logic.
bongodongobob•44m ago
I always thought it was so if an organism takes head damage on one side, the limbs facing the danger will have a better chance to still work, giving it a better chance to fend whatever off and survive.

iPhone Air

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/09/introducing-iphone-air-a-powerful-new-iphone-with-a-breakt...
552•excerionsforte•9h ago•1193 comments

Things you can do with a debugger but not with print debugging

https://mahesh-hegde.github.io/posts/what_debugger_can/
45•never_inline•2d ago•22 comments

E-paper display reaches the realm of LCD screens

https://spectrum.ieee.org/e-paper-display-modos
275•rbanffy•9h ago•90 comments

Outraged Farmers Blame Ag Monopolies as Catastrophic Collapse Looms

https://www.agweb.com/markets/outraged-farmers-blame-ag-monopolies-catastrophic-collapse-looms
118•strict9•2h ago•118 comments

Claude now has access to a server-side container environment

https://www.anthropic.com/news/create-files
454•meetpateltech•12h ago•258 comments

Axial twist theory

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_twist_theory
81•lordnacho•3d ago•14 comments

We all dodged a bullet

https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/we-dodged-a-bullet/
584•WhyNotHugo•12h ago•336 comments

US High school students' scores fall in reading and math

https://apnews.com/article/naep-reading-math-scores-12th-grade-c18d6e3fbc125f12948cc70cb85a520a
261•bikenaga•12h ago•374 comments

Memory Integrity Enforcement

https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement/
331•circuit•8h ago•153 comments

Immunotherapy drug clinical trial results: half of tumors shrink or disappear

https://www.rockefeller.edu/news/38120-immunotherapy-drug-eliminates-aggressive-cancers-in-clinic...
290•marc__1•6h ago•60 comments

Tomorrow's emoji today: Unicode 17.0

https://jenniferdaniel.substack.com/p/tomorrows-emoji-today-unicode-170
113•ChrisArchitect•9h ago•159 comments

DuckDB NPM packages 1.3.3 and 1.29.2 compromised with malware

https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb-node/security/advisories/GHSA-w62p-hx95-gf2c
323•tosh•17h ago•242 comments

YouTube is a mysterious monopoly

https://anderegg.ca/2025/09/08/youtube-is-a-mysterious-monopoly
145•geerlingguy•22h ago•203 comments

A new experimental Go API for JSON

https://go.dev/blog/jsonv2-exp
181•darccio•12h ago•60 comments

Hypervisor in 1k Lines

https://1000hv.seiya.me/en
24•lioeters•4h ago•2 comments

Show HN: Bottlefire – Build single-executable microVMs from Docker images

https://bottlefire.dev/
56•losfair•2d ago•8 comments

Building a DOOM-like multiplayer shooter in pure SQL

https://cedardb.com/blog/doomql/
150•lvogel•12h ago•31 comments

Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-send-employees-back-to-office-rto-remote-work-2025-9
250•alloyed•10h ago•451 comments

She puts the Lord in 'vanlord.' Palo Alto wants to ban her business

https://sanjosespotlight.com/she-puts-the-lord-in-vanlord-palo-alto-wants-to-ban-her-business/
5•harambae•2d ago•1 comments

An attacker’s blunder gave us a look into their operations

https://www.huntress.com/blog/rare-look-inside-attacker-operation
130•mellosouls•11h ago•82 comments

Anthropic judge rejects $1.5B AI copyright settlement

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/anthropic-judge-blasts-copyright-pact-as-nowhere-close-to-done
192•nobody9999•18h ago•209 comments

ICE is using fake cell towers to spy on people's phones

https://www.forbes.com/sites/the-wiretap/2025/09/09/how-ice-is-using-fake-cell-towers-to-spy-on-p...
497•coloneltcb•10h ago•204 comments

Go for Bash Programmers – Part II: CLI Tools

https://github.com/go-monk/from-bash-to-go-part-ii
91•reisinge•1d ago•3 comments

Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation

https://help.dropbox.com/installs/paper-mobile-discontinuation
123•mercenario•9h ago•105 comments

A cryptography expert on how Web3 started, and how it’s going

https://spectrum.ieee.org/web3-hardware-security
144•warrenm•8h ago•161 comments

NASA finds Titan's alien lakes may be creating primitive cells

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2025/08/250831112449.htm
44•Gaishan•3h ago•2 comments

Weave (YC W25) is hiring a founding AI engineer

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/weave-3/jobs/SqFnIFE-founding-ai-engineer
1•adchurch•10h ago

Cassette Logic: technology that never dies but is already dead

https://www.differentshelf.com/cassette-logic/
9•seductivebarry•2d ago•8 comments

Mistral raises 1.7B€, partners with ASML

https://mistral.ai/news/mistral-ai-raises-1-7-b-to-accelerate-technological-progress-with-ai
726•TechTechTech•21h ago•385 comments

Anscombe's Quartet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe%27s_quartet
111•gidellav•1d ago•25 comments