A late addition to my year highlights, but straight in near the top has to be our trip to see this @operanorth.co.uk production of David Shrigley's Pass The Spoon. Who knew that our lives needed a chorus for choosing a soup flavour and making gravy... ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ www.theguardian.com/music/2025/d...

Absolutely nobody asked for this BUT English Anglican cathedrals that have burned down, fallen over, and sank into the swamp: a thread.

New Home Office impact assessment finds that cutting skilled and social care visas will cost the UK up to £10 billion with a central estimate of -£5.4 billion. It would be good if this got even a fraction of the coverage devoted to the endless debate about boats, flags and Turkish barber shops

Welcome to Britain, a country so short of dentists that an MP's 87-year-old mum pulled her teeth out with pliers. Also a country with thousands of foreign-qualified dentists who can’t work until they pass an exam so oversubscribed it’s like trying to book Glasto tickets. www.ft.com/content/f4e5...

The heat isn't going away. 2025 on track to tie second warmest year ever Climate change is generating food-price inflation in Europe, catastrophic flooding in south-east Asia Likely this warmth will continue into next year with further impacts. It may be permanent www.ft.com/content/9e0e...

To be honest, I thought the annoying little needy bird would mark this milestone with a bit more enthusiasm, not just a "would you like to set your next milestone to 1025 or 1050 days...." 😒 #WhyNoCake #Duolingo

Fungal Misadventure (a story in the form of a Bluesky thread) "Have you ever wondered?" he asked, as they picked mushrooms in the forest near her house. "How many people died from fungal misadventure during prehistory before we found out which of these were safe to eat?"

Science lovers! Are you going to try and convince some child in your life that science is fun and worthwhile this Christmas? You could buy them one of dozens of commercially available "science kits" OR you could MAKE YOUR OWN to accompany a copy of "Mr Shaha's Recipes for Wonder":

There’s some very bad news hidden in the Ofgem price cap for January announced yesterday: the electricity to gas price ratio has jumped to 4.67, its highest level since before the energy crisis. This is a big barrier to households adopting heat pumps in Britain, and threatens our climate goals

Have taken the plunge this week in moving away from big connectivity providers (Virgin and O2) to smaller co's (Zen and 1pmobile). Mobile so far great, but today is the big cable to full fibre upgrade and awaiting the installers...

🚨 BREAKING: Kent County Council is hurtling towards financial oblivion under Reform. A shocking new council report reveals a projected budget black hole of £46.5 million for this year. The Reform Administration has completely lost control of our finances. 🔶

Another dataset confirms that last month was the warmest October on record in the #Arctic. The previous record was 2024. This is already a month with a very large increasing temperature trend (i.e., Arctic amplification). Not good. Data from NASA/GISS GISTEMPv4 (data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/).

WATCH: Seriously, if you’re following ANY bike-lane debate, you HAVE TO WATCH this news story. You actually can’t make this up. Ford claims without evidence that bike-lanes are bad for small business, and THE ACTUAL BUSINESS ASSOCIATION obliterates him with data. Safe bike-lanes mean business.

We have people booked to bring broken food processors, favourite jumpers with damaged zips, and ailing plants. Don't miss this opportunity to repair your stuff with the help of 40 technicians and makers. Repair Café | Sustainable UCL - share.google/2qFlWYPHRPLs...

if not Ponzi, why Ponzi-shaped? www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Nature (likely via the neighbour’s cat) obviously decided we hadn’t done enough to decorate our house for Halloween…

Reimagining Circularity: outline stage #EPSRC

I cannot tell you how many tech journalists at prominent media organizations do not understand this

Hurricane Melissa looks, as Marco says, truly staggering Our house in east London nearly flooded a few years ago after 120mm of rain – and I remember the fallout of the "great storm" in '87, top speed 135mph… …but I can't even begin to imagine the impact of 1,000mm of rain or 200mph gusts

This from a top expert on Antarctica's Thwaites Glacier. Highly likely that we're committing to an additional 3 meters (10 ft) of sea level rise as we speak. Yes, it'll take time to fully materialize, but when will the enormous damage that we're signing up for sink in with voters and policy makers?

….you need to read and understand your contracts. You need to have your contracts read and understood by someone who a) understands the purpose of contracts & b) has *your* best interests at heart. Please, for the love of god, do not rely on some corporation's "AI" to "summaries" your contracts.

Parents! Carers! Anyone thinking of buying a child a "science kit" for Christmas. For the same / less cost, buy a copy of "Recipes for Wonder" and put together a box of household "ingredients" which will let them do actual science and be a much more personal gift alomshaha.com/portfolio/mr...

This person is one hundred percent correct and it’s scary af. We will never “media literacy” our way out of this as a society. We are about to reap the whirlwind when it comes to misinformation, disinformation, and informational warfare.

"OpenAI...constantly needs fresh injections of investor cash, because its costs are bigger than its revenues—keeps announcing deals to invest billions in chip makers. Unless they invent digital god & completely transform the global economy... they’re going to run into some hard accounting realities"

Will be advertising a PhD studentship on this topic soon. Do get in touch if you are interested.

We need a circular economy for materials. Our critical materials report recommends improved repair, recycling and recovery of electronics to preserve valuable materials stocks like lithium and neodymium. Read now on International e-waste day: https://raeng.org.uk/critical-materials #EWasteDay

My recommendation from this week is: if you leave a gig saying "that was so good I could see it again", it's worth checking twickets, even if it's sold out, because then you can do just that #DoubleSelfEsteem 🥳 @selfesteem.music-social.com

This is really cool - we got bored of seeing the same stock pictures of heat pumps over and over again, so my colleagues* have started a library of images anyone can use. (*a Nesta - Climate Visuals collaboration) www.climatevisuals.org/heatpumps/

We don’t all share the same internet. The personalised algorithm has siloed us into parallel worlds

Optimistic about this - yeast as a replacement for palm oil...

First Past the Post cannot handle this level of fragmentation. It will produce completely freak results. We can grasp this problem now, or wait for the train to crash.

In late June, Google quietly scrubbed its pledge to hit net zero by 2030 from its sustainability website as it goes full steam ahead on hyperscale data centers and generative AI.

“AI isn’t magic; it’s a pyramid scheme of human labor,” said Adio Dinika, a researcher at the Distributed AI Research Institute…These raters are the middle rung: invisible, essential and expendable.”

My contribution to the Angela Raynor resignation debate: The are now 70 people watching a second hand pair of ME+EM green trousers on Vinted now...

And again, things go much faster than expected: The staggeringly rapid expansion of the drying regions was surprising even for the scientists

If you read just one article, this week, make it this one? I've read it three times; each time my heart has been warmed and I've laughed like a plumbers' warehouse-ful of drains 31 NOTES I HAVE MADE ABOUT MY DAD IN MY NOTEBOOK via @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social the-villager.ghost.io/31-notes-i-h...

Timeline cleanse

Expect your mobile to go off 3pm Sunday! Be prepared for a test of the Govt's emergency alert system. Full info... www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/2025/09... LIVING WITH DOMESTIC ABUSE? If you've a hidden mobile, you the link above has details of how to opt out of the alert. Pls share

This map shows which year had the warmest summer on record, for mean temperature, area by area. Note that for many areas, it was summer 2025. 1976 is no longer the warmest summer on record for any area.

Very cool tool from Bellingcat. Should be great for local and independent journalists! @publicinterestnews.org.uk @petergeoghegan.bsky.social

Children are ***82%*** more likely to be killed when hit by an SUV than by a regular passenger car. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

It's depressing that it was nearly 10 yrs when @alexsteffen.bsky.social wrote this article, but I still refer to it when looking at people's action on climate... Unfortunately, it pays big (for some) to delay, and every day counts 🙄

Is this what the AI era is going to be like? A big four consultancy (Deloitte) does a major report for govt then says "oh we just got the names, dates and publishers" of many of the works cited WRONG. No biggie. www.afr.com//companies/p...

It can be simultaneously true that individual AI prompts use minuscule amounts of energy, and also that the growth of AI in general threatens global progress on decarbonisation.

What’s going on in Antarctica is really scary: the abrupt decline in Antarctica's winter sea-ice extent over the past decade has been 4.4 times faster than reductions seen in the Arctic over the past 46 years

Enjoyed the @soozuk.bsky.social show on Monday at the fringe... Which is definitely probably just about humans

...on public health provision in the North-West of England. One of the cases was a not-spot of MMR vaccination in one of the most deprived communities. It turned out that local health services had closed down, so it was now a two-hour, £8, four-bus journey to the place where your kid could...

Well this is bad. Google is indexing ChatGPT conversations exposing sensitive user data I tried a few quick searches. I found someone's chat where I can see their api key I found some building their resume. Their name, email and phone numbers are exposed. www.fastcompany.com/91376687/goo...