Chris Simms

YouTube video by Mill Creek Entertainment Heathcliff (intro)

I watched Wuthering Heights last night. In classic brain association, now the theme tune to the cartoon Heathcliff in lodged in my head. Does anyone else remember it? youtu.be/9LLb8EBU9nQ?...

Causes and Effects of Climate Change | United Nations Fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas – are by far the largest contributor to global climate change, accounting for over 75 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions and nearly 90 per cent of all ca...

www.un.org/en/climatech...
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Because if you look at the science, one thing is crystal clear. If you don’t care about the environment, you don’t care about people. If the environment collapses because of climate change, so too will everything supporting the food, health and wealth of humanity.

People can attempt to rebuild the system by turning to parties that care about the environment and about people and want to rebuild in a more sustainable, equal way.

If people aren’t happy with the current situation, they don’t have to turn towards divisive, right-wing parties that will almost inevitably work to tread harder on the downtrodden and accrue even more wealth to the rich.

Maybe, just maybe, people will see there is another way to rebel against the incompetence and self-interest of the big political parties (which put party and power before country) and the injustices and failings of the current systems.

But still, it makes me hope that maybe the rise of authoritarian politicians like Trump who brazenly lie and erode the pillars of democracy, free speech and science won’t just inspire political mimics who care about attaining power more than they do about people.

It helps massively that Hannah Spencer @greenpartyhan.bsky.social seems a lovely, down-to-earth woman with a desire for change who speaks to everyday frustrations. bsky.app/profile/gree...

In Gorton and Denton, the Green Party beat Labour, Reform, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. Previously, a vote for the Greens was considered by many to be a wasted vote as they would never get enough votes to win anything.

Hannah Spencer: the Green MP speaking to everyday people’s frustrations Winner of Gorton and Denton byelection was driven into politics by growing gap between super-rich and the ‘rest of us’

The by-election win by Hannah Spencer of the Green Party has reignited a tiny spark of hope in me when it comes to politics. I have to admit to becoming pretty disillusioned with it all. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

This is very cool. I'd never even heard of sundew bugs before, but species in the Setocoris genus seem to steal their food from carnivorous sundew plants, in what is known as kleptobiosis - a form of kleptoparasitism in which one organism steals resources collected by another. 🧪 🐛 🪴 #science

Vegetable seeds planted in trays and pots starting to sprout

The seedlings are emerging. Here comes spring!

One of the authors, @mireniraorb.bsky.social‬, gives some nice information on it here: bsky.app/profile/mire...

A large mass grave from the Early Iron Age indicates selective violence towards women and children in the Carpathian Basin - Nature Human Behaviour In this analysis of biomolecular and archaeological data from a ninth-century BCE mass grave in the Carpathian Basin, Fibiger et al. find evidence for the targeted killing of mostly unrelated women an...

There are many more gruesome details in my @newscientist.com story in the first link. The original paper is in Nature Human Behaviour @natureportfolio.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

"The time between the establishment of the tell and this massacre is actually a longer period than from the massacre to today, which gives you some sense of how long Gomolava was occupied,” Barry Molloy at @ucdarchaeology.bsky.social told me.

The mass grave was found at Gomolava, an early Iron Age site in the Carpathian basin in what is now Serbia. The place is an artificial mound known as a tell, formed by the accumulation of debris from thousands of years of human habitation from the late 6th millennium BC

Brutal Iron Age massacre may have targeted women and children An examination of bones has revealed one of the largest prehistoric mass killings known in Europe, with women, adolescents and children making up most of the 77 victims

Women and children may have been deliberately targeted in one of the largest prehistoric mass killings discovered in Europe. Buried together more than 2,800 years ago, most of the 77 victims suffered violent deaths. 🧪 #archaeology @newscientist.com #history

www.newscientist.com/article/2516...

What makes all this coverage mildly frustrating is... look, if I drove to my job five times a week, I would be paying between $20 and $30 in gas. That's between $1000 and $1500 a year. If I keep my car ten years, that's $10k to $15k. You make up the cost on the back end!

Looks more like Trametes versicolor/turkey tail to me.

Football journalism can often be obvious pub chat, but @guillem-balague.bsky.social is always at least a cut above this. This article on the racism suffered by Vinicius Jr is superb. #racism #football #sport @bbcsportbot.bsky.social #BBCNews #BBC

The hope is, however, that identifying differences in brain connections could lead to better treatments for mental health conditions that affect women more, such as depression and anxiety. 11/11

Differences could be down to hormone changes – which would fit with changes in puberty – or the genderisation of society or other factors. 10/11

What is behind the differences isn’t know, though. This research is just spotting differences in physical brain connections and functional links between brain areas that are linked by simultaneous activity, not looking for causes. 9/11

These results are based on sex at birth, the researchers didn’t have information on the gender people assigned themselves. 8/11

It has found that sex differences in the brain’s connections are minimal in early life, but then increase drastically at puberty. Some of these differences continue to grow throughout adult life. 7/11

This latest work, by @amykooz.bsky.social and her colleagues and published as a preprint on bioRxiv, and so not yet been peer reviewed, has looked at brain-imaging data from people aged between 8 and 100 and studied how connections change over a lifetime 6/11
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

And yet over recent years, studies that look at more and more variations at once in brains have started to pick up more sex-based differences – often in the ways brain regions are connected. 5/11

This is once you account for the complicating factor that men, on average, have bigger bodies and so bigger heads, which can skew brain data results. 4/11

Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic | PNAS Whereas a categorical difference in the genitals has always been acknowledged, the question of how far these categories extend into human biology i...

But research has also shown that human brains can’t be discretely categorised as male or female because each one is a mosaic of features, some that are more common in men, some that are more common in women 3/11
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

A lot has been written about male and female brains. Some would have you believe they are very different, leading to the “men are from Mars and women are from Venus” trope. 2/11