@HStiles1

Urgent: Please ask your MP to speak out against new funding for Drax’s tree burning The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has launched an investigation into the UK’s single largest carbon emitter and the world’s biggest tree burner, Drax, over concerns about its sourcing of wood pell...

Drax's tree burning energy is destroying forests, polluting communities, harming wildlife & making the #climatecrisis worse! 🏭🌳🔥 Call on the Government to end subsidies for Drax's tree burning & reject Drax's AI data centre funding bid? tinyurl.com/yddsnsx7 #BigBadBiomass

Tree with red and golden leaves, growing by a fence with green grass and a blue sky in the background

Good morning! First convincing sun we’ve had in several weeks – lovely to see

We had first convincing rain for months yesterday !

😡

The ARCTIC SEA - a weird vessel hijacking off the 🇸🇪island of Gotland 6 Oct 2009 & I was interviewed by Swedish Radio. It got weirder when the Russian Navy chased it & caught it off the Cape Verde Islands. 2 week's ago a "hijacker" was arrested - Looking forward to the book 😉👇🏻link

It set in the end - mosltly. Wonder if It hit the hot temperature. Sister has obtained a tray full from her neighbour so I can have another go!

Global maps stacked vertical showing the annual number of hot days at 2.6C of warming (top) and 4C of warming (bottom) Increasing shades of red are seen in the tropics indicating the highest number of annual days.

10yrs after the Paris Agreement, a new study from Climate Central and @wwattribution.bsky.social found that it could help Earth avoid some of the worst outcomes of climate change. But w/o stronger planning/commitments, future gens still face dangerous heat.
www.climatecentral.org/report/10th-...

Well done! 👍
Made quince jam today - does not appear to have set despite pectin & pectin sugar! Will re-try tomorrow... ☹️

All those comedians & sports people taking the Saudi shilling - you are pathetic

Google AI summary for a query about Pope Leo and Gaza, claiming that "As of October 2025, there is no Pope Leo. The current Pope is Francis."

Fresh reminder that AI still sucks.

This image is figure 3 from the paper showing the reconstructed left hand of the KNM-ER 101000 fossils.

A newly uncovered set of 1.5-million-year-old fossils that includes the first unambiguous Paranthropus boisei hand bones are reported in Nature. The findings offer insights into the evolution of hominin hands. go.nature.com/495cW1I 🧪 🏺

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” —Robert Louis Stevenson
#writing #quotes #BrendaBarker #secondchance #motivation #writingcommunity

Reaching the Finish Line with Zamyatin, Le Guin, and Foucault Still in My Head The book ends, as these things always do, with a sigh and a stack of annotated pages. I’ve just closed the cover on Zamyatin’s We, and, like a cigarette slipped into the afterword, there sat Ursula…

I recommend Zamyatin's We. Written in 1921, it's a precursor to dystopian classics such as 1984 and Brave New World – better, at least relative to the depth of its political narrative.

ridleypark.blog/2025/10/15/r...

#books #classics #reading #AmReading #novels #dystopian #fiction #Literature

Virtual event: Sat Oct 18 monster convo! 9-11am ET / 2-4pm UK.

@nromanek.bsky.social will interview me and Esti Reich about monsters and the creative process: literature, visual arts, TV, film.

Register today; come chat with us!

#monsters #art #arthistory #movies #histsci #writingcommunity 💙📚 🗃

He was a big bloke I think - was it him or his father who worked as a brickie? [checks...] - ah - his stepfather... oh but he apprenticed as one! I remember something then from a slim biography I read decades ago!

Just behind Marlowe! 🤓

That coffee should be following the law of gravity!

Carbon offsets fail to cut global heating due to ‘intractable’ systemic problems, study says Analysis of 25 years of evidence shows most schemes are poor quality and fail to lower emissions

🌍 Carbon offsets largely fail to cut emissions

A 25-year review found most carbon offset schemes do not reduce global heating, with systemic flaws like double counting and temporary projects undermining real progress.

🔗 www.theguardian.com/environment/...

#SciComm #Climate #CarbonOffsets 🧪

🧠 How ageing reshapes the brain

Scans from 2,600 adults show that ageing expands lower front brain areas and compresses upper back ones. These shape shifts link to weaker thinking and memory.

🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

#SciComm #Ageing 🧪

Recent and early 20th century destabilization of the subpolar North Atlantic recorded in bivalves Clams reveal North Atlantic destabilization in the early 20th century and at present.

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... 🧪

Cell nuclei movements (color-coded for direction) during early zebrafish development. Credit to Dr. Philipp Keller @hhmijanelia.bsky.social. #ZebrafishZunday

@jennyrohn.bsky.social probably a bit too scifi for us... but I got it as I like short novels! 😎

The 'first serious' Italian Scifi novel from 1960 #booksky

Larger than Life (novel) - Wikipedia

I am thinking this may be pure scifi - @lablit.bsky.social though I thought possibly #lablit
The Singularity
Dino Buzzati
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larger_...

🧪To understand why pregnancy has a duel-effect with breast cancer risk, we have to understand what's going on in the body during and after pregnancy. And the answer is A LOT of stuff is going on. #Pregnancy is an amazing biological phenomenon!

"the available evidence suggests that the ongoing extinction episode still falls a long way short of the devastation caused by the bolide impact 66 Ma, but that it has likely surpassed most other Cenozoic events in magnitude, with the possible exception of the Eocene–Oligocene transition (34 Ma)"

‘Earth system engineers’ and the cumulative impact of organisms in deep time Understanding the role of humans as ‘ecosystem engineers’ requires a deep-time perspective rooted in evolutionary history and the fossil record. However, no conceptual framework exists for studying th...

www.cell.com/trends/ecolo... 🧪 ‘Earth system engineers’ and the cumulative impact of organisms in deep time

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.... The Mechanisms Through Which Fire Drives Population Change in Terrestrial Biota 🧪

The climate effects of nuclear war Nuclear weapons pose the most acute existential threat to humankind and the biosphere. Both qualitatively and quantitatively, they are uniquely destructive. Their incendiary effects are likely to e...

The #'climate effects of nuclear war 🧪https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/13623699.2025.2560274?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed

Molecular Paleontology Meets Drug Discovery: The Case for De-extinct Antimicrobials The rise of antibiotic resistance has necessitated the exploration of unconventional sources of novel antimicrobial agents. One emerging novel frontier is “de-extinct” molecules─bioactive peptides, antibiotics, and other bioactive agents reconstructed from ancient or extinct organisms─an innovative convergence of paleogenomics, paleoproteomics, and synthetic biology. Recent advances in high-throughput DNA sequencing, mass spectrometry, and computational biology have enabled scientists to recover and analyze genetic and protein sequences from long-extinct species, offering unprecedented insights into evolutionary biology and potential applications in medicine, biotechnology, and conservation, including the successful regeneration of antimicrobial molecules from several extinct organisms. While paleogenomics provides the blueprint for reconstructing extinct genomes, paleoproteomics offers complementary insights into gene expression, protein function, and post-translational modifications that are often lost in DNA-based studies. These approaches can yield proteins and metabolites that have been lost to evolution, offering a new reservoir of bioactive compounds that could be used for new strategies in medicine, biotechnology, and synthetic biology. In this report we explore data from the CAS Content Collection to outline the current landscape and research progress in the emerging area of molecular de-extinction, to identify key developing concepts and challenges, and to identify successfully revived de-extinct antimicrobials. We outline the technical approaches to their revival in an effort to understand how this highly innovative strategy helps combat modern multidrug-resistant pathogens as well as the challenges and ethical considerations in deploying ancient molecules.

pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/... @jennyrohn.bsky.social may interest?