spuncosmos

Australia is seen as a young country — but do you really know its ancient story? Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' story goes way, way back… take an awe-inspiring journey into Deep Time.

#Australian First Peoples have survived here for at least 65,000 yrs.

They’ve lived through an ice age, volcanic eruptions, and shared the land with giant animals that no longer exist... Precious knowledge passed down thru 2,300 generations.

www.abc.net.au/news/deeptim...
#DeepTime #FirstPeoples

Tawny frogmouth named 2025 Australian bird of the year – live Follow live as we announce the winner of the 2025 Australian bird of the year

A worthy winner - if you can spot it! HT Tawny frogmouth named 2025 #Australian #BirdoftheYear via @australia.theguardian.com #birds www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Australian bird of the year 2025: vote for your favourite #birdoftheyear in the Guardian / BirdLife Australia poll From little penguins to (very big) cassowaries, every bird has its fans. Vote for your favourite in the 2025 Guardian/BirdLife Australia poll

Vote now, if you haven't already, for the Guardian's Bird of the Year 2025

It helps to nominate a bird that's endangered, giving it a much higher profile - like Baudin's black cockatoo for example

Please vote - this is a wonderful environmental exercise

🙏🏽 🦜

www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Image of a graphic that looks like a woodcut or Lino print. flat brown colour against a buff background. The text reads “no more girl bossing, I want to girl rest. Girl sleep. Girl lay down on the forest floor and be absorbed by nature. I want to girl moss.” The image depicted is a simplifying line depiction of a long haired women lying down asleep.

#Monday #GirlMoss #GirlBoss.
🎨 @awokenshit on insta.

#DLDday is coming, so I’m starting a thread over a few days.

DLD (Developmental Language Disorder) is all about spoken language. Words and sentences are tricky for people with DLD. And people don’t grow out of it.
#DevLangDis @radld.bsky.social

“Life’s meaning is lost without the spirit of play. In play all that is lovely and soaring in the human spirit strives to find expression. In play the mind is prepared to enter a world where different rules apply, to be free.”

~ Eileen Agar

My BC is similarly dramatic. I call him my special snowflake 🥰

Denni, a golden retriever with a sweet face, sits and looks up at the camera with a smile. she has a passenger clinging to her back. a baby koala. the joey's eyes peak over the top of Denni's head.

Denni is standing and looking off to the left of the frame. the baby koala on her back looks at the camera.

a super zoomed photo of the baby koala and their mom high up in a tree. the adult koala holds onto her joey and looks down at the camera with what we would like to think is appreciation for caring for her baby.

This is Denni. She took an unexpected babysitting shift when she found a baby koala in her yard. She cheerfully delivered the joey to her human, who put them back in the tree to be reunited with their mom. 14/10 (FB: Steve Lamplough)

I’m a MAJOR owl fan, but my favourite is the burrowing owl:
✔️v frowny & grumpy-they know what you did last Tuesday
✔️digs holes then peeps out of them
✔️EXPERTS at the wobbly head bendy neck owl thing
✔️long leggies
✔️does very silly running on said leggies
10/10 no owly notes HIGHLY recommended

My Etsy shop's now open for my 5 sets of greetings cards:spring,summer,autumn,nature/botanical collections & tiny posies.I post to the US now too
I create each of my photos using recent neuroscientific research-looking at them shifts your brain away from fight or flight: www.etsy.com/uk/shop/silv...

Congratulations! 🌈

‘Jeff Buckley was a once-in-a-lifetime’: Australia’s 30-year love affair with an enduring, tragic talent The 30th anniversary of Buckley’s first tour of Australia – which loved his ethereal sound before the US – coincides with a revival of interest in his life and death at just 30 * Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email You had to see Jeff Buckley to believe him. Jon Pope, a veteran of the Australian music industry, was tour manager for the singer on his first visit to Australia, in 1995. Three days after Buckley’s first show at the Metro in Sydney on 28 August, the road crew were preparing for a much more intimate gig at the Lounge in Melbourne for an audience of a few hundred. Sign up for our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Continue reading...

‘Jeff Buckley was a once-in-a-lifetime’: Australia’s 30-year love affair with an enduring, tragic talent

a 19th century embroidery sampler showing the solar system, the distance of the planets from the sun, and the length of time it takes each planet to circle the sun

Imagine the complicated and precious genius of the girl who made this embroidery sampler in 1811

The Solar System, sampler, unknown maker, 1811, England. Museum no. T.92-1939. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The growing body of evidence showing children actively maximise the learning affordances in their surroundings - and that optimal input changes dramatically depending on developmental level - is a potential game changer for intervention approaches.

A photo of the Derwent river at sunset, the sun just visible over the trees silhouetted in the midground. In the background, the mountain Kunanyi. In the foreground, wet sand.

I think some of you need this view of Hobart at dusk.

It is precisely as we have always said. This moment, a long time in the works (with many failed attempts) will likely succeed under Labor which created the scheme.

Breaking news: “Thriving Kids” – more than just a new name for Foundational Supports for children? “Thriving Kids”, announced by Minister Mark Butler on 20 August 2025, is the snappy new name for Foundational Supports for children. But is it more than that? We don’t have a lot of details right n…

Big news today for Australian children with developmental delay and disability, and their families (and allied health professionals): www.theproviderloft.com.au/breaking-new...

I would love to have this shipped to Australia!

Tens of thousands of cornflowers in a field in Wicken. Research shows that the sight of them will help you recover from sources of stress more quickly & boost dopamine release in your brain, lifting your mood…in case you need it just now:

Comic depictions of the first page of research papers in the language sciences, with titles that include the following: Just what the hell is a word anyway? See how this single cognitive process or brain area or neural oscillation or gene explains language! Based on the shapes of these old bones, Homo erectus could sing .... don't @ me. A baby looked at one thing more than the other, now we know the secret to grammar. If you think about it, every language is fundamentally the same, amirite? We taught a load of undergrads a made-up language, lol. On the staggering diversity of the many languages across the world. Remember the thing you said only humans could do, here's a video of a monkey / dolphin / corvid / octopus / honeybee doing it. I trained this AI with 80 billion tweets and it became head-writer for phase 4 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

To accompany all those Bluesky science/academia #starterpacks, how about we also share introductions to the literature of our different fields. I present here a handy guide to main types of papers in the language sciences (inspired by the amazing @xkcd.com).
#language #linguistics #science #academia

I’ve never seen this! Thank you for sharing it with me.

Thank you! I am a fan of Pelton’s work and this is a small way of connecting with her.

A Pathway to Research-Reliable Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing for Children With Childhood Apraxia of Speech: A Multiphase Process for Training Community Clinicians Purpose: Mounting research supports the use of motor-based intervention (e.g., Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing [DTTC]) for children with chil...

🥳 WOOT! 🆓🔓 in @ashajournals.bsky.social A Pathway to Research-Reliable Dynamic Temporal and Tactile Cueing for Children With #ChildApraxiaSpeech: A Multiphase Process for Training Community Clinicians. 2025. AJSLP doi.org/10.1044/2025... #childspeechdis #apraxia 🦋 #bskySPEECHIES #DTTC

“It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.” I love the thing that I most wish had not happened. I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

when i think of Colbert, i think of an interview he gave to GQ when he first took over The Late Show, and had this to say about losing his father and brothers in a plane crash. www.gq.com/story/stephe...

A painting of a house in the forest, snd the house has tangled roots resching down into the soil

Yes, the world is hard, the universities are in trouble, AI is taking over, and fascism is rising: but don't let that stop you from making your life and home an oasis. A place where books, dreams, reason, and kindness can be safe. 🌙

🎨 Kinko White

Photograph: Our young brown-and-white spaniel, Lottie, at the top of the hill behind our house. Dartmoor, Devon, southwest England.

“We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but we notice each other's beautiful face & complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.” - Annie Dillard

‘Referred to as Gawarrgay in language of the Australian First Nations Kamilaroi people, the Celestial Emu describes how many First Nations people viewed the Milky Way—and how it was part of their way of passing on knowledge of the land and sky through many generations. In the early part of the Milky Way Core season, the Emu rises from the horizon, standing proudly in the sky, as in this image. In the later part of the season, the Emu lies on its back, resting. The Emu’s head is the dark region of the sky, near to the Southern Cross, known as the Coalsack Nebula. In this image, the Coalsack Nebula is near the top right, with the body of the Emu extending towards the horizon in the bottom left, near the windmill.’ Image and text by Des Paroz (@desparoz.com on Bluesky). Created near the township of Nimmitabel in southern NSW, Australia in May 2024.

The Celestial Emu proudly watches over Australia.

#DarkEmu #MilkyWay #Emu #Astronomy #Australia #NightSky

This month's @speechbite.bsky.social newsletter includes lots of lovely EBP goodies, and includes a hand-dandy video tutorial on how SPA members can access the CINAHL database. #SLPeeps

From outlaw bushrangers who fell in love to a famous horseman born a woman, Australia’s history is full of queer stories At the time LGBTQ+ people had to hide away. But researchers are now working to discover and celebrate them * Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast In 1841, Anne Drysdale invited Caroline Newcomb to live with her on her farm outside Geelong. It was a bold move for the time: the full decriminalisation of homosexuality was 156 years away;the legalisation of same-sex marriage, 176 years. In colonial Australia, women did not own property,let alone share one, and the same bed. Continue reading...

From outlaw bushrangers who fell in love to a famous horseman born a woman, Australia’s history is full of queer stories

Constructing language: a framework for explaining acquisition Explaining how children build a language system is a central goal of research in language acquisition, with broad implications for language evolution, adult language processing, and artificial intelli...

Children are incredible language learning machines. But how do they do it? Our latest paper, just published in TICS, synthesizes decades of evidence to propose four components that must be built into any theory of how children learn language. 1/
www.cell.com/trends/cogni... @mpi-nl.bsky.social