Dorothy Bishop

Once more for the weekend long read crowd 👇

Justice Department unexpectedly drops fraud case against Alzheimer’s scientist Decision comes after disclosure of university letter concluding Hoau-Yan Wang did not engage in misconduct

www.science.org/content/arti...

#NewIllustrationOfTheDay by Rob Biddulph from I Follow the Fox, out in paperback from HarperCollins 9 October. A picturebook about a lost toy, a lost fox cub and a wild nighttime adventure. A captivating depiction here of light on snow at sunrise. @robbiddulph.bsky.social @harpercollins.bsky.social

We must act now: without a written constitution, Reform UK will have carte blanche to toxify our nation | Goerge Monbiot It means breaking with hundreds of years of tradition, but it can’t wait. As hard-right figures spread division and laud autocrats, a fail-safe is vital, says Guardian columnist George Monbiot

We're facing a political emergency: a high likelihood of an shamelessly authoritarian government in 2029. So we urgently need this basic safeguard: a codified constitution.
This week's column explains what we're missing and why it's so important.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

just to say that as a resident of the UK, real kings have a lot more dignity and a lot less power than your guy

this is relevant jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

False hope, fabricated data: No public notice after UBC uncovered serious misconduct in medical study | CBC News A celebrated Vancouver researcher used fabricated data and hid evidence of infected wounds to falsely claim his patented skin treatment could heal years-old bed sores in a matter of weeks, according t...

Another example of institutional investigations conducted in secret, without a public report, for 'privacy reasons'.

Investigation found UBC researcher fabricated data, gave spinal patients 'false hope.' The public was not told.

www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

New Aaron Sorkin pitch just dropped.

A great blue heron catches a fish at dusk at Izaak Walton Nature Area in Longmont, Colorado.

#FlyDay #EastCoastKin #BirdOfTheDay #flying #bird #birds #birdphotography #photography #photograph #photographs #photo #photos #nature #wetland #wetlands #greatblueheron #greatblueherons #heron

Ouse Valley Viaduct, Sussex, UK

Shocking result for Labour, obviously. You’d hope that they might learn something from this – that chasing the racist vote doesn’t win them votes from racists but just loses them votes from decent people – but I’ve no hope that Starmer and his team are capable of grasping that.

Portrait of me at Nine Elms station

A Portrait - Nine Elms

A random quick portrait of me taken by Andreya.

This scene is one of my favourite visual sights to enjoy on the tube network, if you visit Nine Elms station at the right time on a sunny day you'll be rewarded with these spectacular shadows & projections.

Qi-Gong Master’s Bigu Diet “Without even drinking water, she sometimes gained 0.5 kg to 1 kg after a telephone conversation with Dr. Yan.”

One of Xin Yan's coauthors on a couple of those garbage papers was a Delia Wolf Christiani. In her later role as Prof. at Harvard (& Research Integrity Officer) she did not reply to questions about them, or how she felt about XY's legal threats against critics.
forbetterscience.com/2021/06/17/q...

Two cats sitting on top of cages and looking at the ceiling

Two cars on the floor staring up at the ceiling

Two young kittens in a cage taking notice

A cat standing on her hind legs to reach for a moth

A moth got into the shelter tonight and it was the event of the season.

Still amusing to me that MAGA’s alpha male hero is obsessed with a gilded ballroom. They voted for Rambo and got Liberace.

Happy to share a new peer-reviewed study on PubMed. Blessing eggs creates bigger and tastier chickens (p < 0.001). pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41035978/

Look, I'll be honest. It's a frog that looks like an inflated testicle. Muscular, robust arms and tiny, tiny eyes with a sort of micro-pignose are the only features on what looks like a wrinkled, skin covered balloon. Behind it is leaf litter of predominantly yellow grass. Credit: Karthickbala

Be sure to zoom in and really drink deep of the majesty of the purple frog (Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis), also called the pignose frog.

They're native to southern India & have some really unusual adaptations to their life cycle. I promise their bizarre shape will make sense.

(📷: Karthickbala)

“U.S. Strikes 2nd Boat in Pacific as Antidrug Operation Expands” New York Times headline, October 23, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/22/us/politics/trump-drug-boat-strike-colombia.html

Did the New York Times have an editorial meeting where they said something like “these are trustworthy people, we should take their word, put it headlines, that’s good journalism.”

Did they go so far as to say “we should help the Trump administration sell this action”?

Or do they just sorta do it?

shouldn’t it be the balls room?

Journal retracts paper by ‘miracle doctor’ claiming life force kills cancer cells Yan Xin A “miracle doctor” in China and his colleagues have lost a 2007 paper on the ability of the martial art qigong to treat cancer after the journal that published the work said it failed to pr…

Springer Nature should fire the editor who accepted this paper. NIH funding too. Our tax dollars at work.

a mole of moles

Here's a way to visualize just how big a number 10^23 is. If you brought together 1 mole of moles, it would have approximately the mass of the Moon.

And it would be very, very messy.

what-if.xkcd.com/4/

"There are things in the world so massive that the British parliament, and you I'm afraid, are not dealing with... are not gripping"

Rory Stewart, former Conservative Minister and co-host of The Rest Is Politics, argues that there's too much focus on Prince Andrew.

#Newsnight

Potential harm from universal school-based mental health interventions: Candidate mechanisms and future directions

Abstract Universal school-based mental health interventions involve lessons delivered to whole classes of young people irrespective of need, with the overall aim of improving mental health literacy, preventing mental health problems and/or reducing those that have already started. A number of high-quality trials show that universal interventions can have a range of negative effects, with participants in the intervention group experiencing worsening mental health or other negative outcomes. In this review, we summarise what we know so far about these negative effects, which we refer to as ‘potential harm’. Two important questions remain poorly understood. First, the mechanisms driving potential harm are unknown, including whether negative effects are driven by reporting phenomena, the content of the intervention itself, or both. Second, individual differences in susceptibility to these effects is unclear. In the second half of the paper, we explore whether further universal trials should be run and argue that, if they are, the crucial issue of negative effects must be considered at all stages. In particular, we recommend that trials be designed in such a way to test mechanisms and individual differences in response. Information can then be provided to schools and policymakers about why young people might respond in different ways to an intervention, and how to support vulnerable students. Ultimately, this will lead to more effective and less harmful interventions for everyone.

NEW PAPER from me and colleagues, reviewing negative effects found to date in universal school mental health interventions and considering what should happen next

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

brief thread below

My friend told me that her 14 year old son started doing laundry on Sundays for some of his elderly neighbors. He doesn't charge for the labor. And now he is the most popular person in the building and has non stop pies, cookies, and cake. The 14 year old should be our model of modern masculinity.

Narrator

Musk should be allowed nowhere near defence or national security.

The Men Who Stare At Mice “Do Cohen’s colleagues and superiors know or care that he hosts wizards in his lab? Or perhaps this is simply common place, wizards roam throughout MD Anderson free range, blasting the …

100% serious, there's a guy at MD Anderson doing these same psychic moves on mice. forbetterscience.com/2025/02/26/t...

Monty Python understood p-hacking

when the process of applying for a congestion charge permit confuses even computer-literate denizens of North Oxford something has gone wrong
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

New offers from big five ‘still too costly’ for UK universities ‘Significant’ number of institutions predicted to drop deals with main scholarly imprints, leaving journal access much reduced

'New proposals by Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley and Sage were sent to universities this week after their initial offers were decisively rejected by institutions in a sector-wide consultation run by Jisc,...negotiating jointly with Universities UK on behalf of universities.' 1/3

Trump Is Demolishing the Entire East Wing to Make Way for His Ballroom President Trump initially said the construction at the White House would not touch the East Wing or "interfere with the current building." See more updates › ACECO

I am kind of astonished at how muted the reaction has been so far in a country were people try to get, like, gas stations declared as historic landmarks. Can we at least get Mike Johnson on camera claiming he hasn’t seen these pictures? Or doesn’t know where or what the White House is?