Something beautiful for the weekend! An extraordinary Acheulean handaxe knapped around a fossil shell c. 500,000-300,000 years ago! The shell’s central display has been described as an example of aesthetic intention by the toolmaker. West Tofts, Norfolk. 📷 MAA Cambridge University #Archaeology

Funny how this keeps happening?

Chris Mason is a profoundly unserious man who writes about politics as if it were a video game with no real consequences. True to form, this article is purely about optics. Not a single policy is mentioned www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

US Democrats are currently giving UK politicians & journalists a lesson in how to hold Nigel Farage to account. It'd be nice if they paid attention. bsky.app/profile/acyn...

On Science in Action today: the editor who won't be cowed. Following RFKjr's astonishing attack on a vaccine safety study published in Annals of Internal Medicine, editor Christine Laine defends the research, and explains why his demand for its retraction is rebuffed. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w...

Drone footage published at end of July shows former city of Beit Hanoun in north Gaza now rubble. (POV starts about here: 31.534634, 34.542251).

Oh you absolutely useless wankers

The webpage is up for my doc White Coats v the White House, contrasting attitudes to science in DC today with the vision of Vannevar Bush 80 years ago. A chance to review many SinA interviews of the past 6 months, plus new analysis. Producer @stuffandpiffle.bsky.social www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

The cover up is happening in plain sight. Where are those QAnon folks these days? We now actually have a government that is led by a sex trafficker’s pal, and trying to help convicted sex traffickers.

I got hold of the latest *official* stats for how many pheasants are being bred, reared and released in England It's a big number - 25.9 million - but it's far less than the reality It points to widespread rule-breaking by shooting estates failing to register: whoownsengland.org/2025/07/31/l...

If the BBC was doing its job, it would note in its coverage of Reform that 92% of the party's donations come from the fossil fuel industry.

It feels as if the US is dismantling itself. In a generation, children growing up in a Chinese century will wonder at the capabilities of their ancestors

My latest: Polar scientists warn that the White House and NSF are planning to terminate the Nathaniel Palmer, the only US research icebreaker capable of handling Antarctic extremes, this October. So far the plan has seen minimal pushback from Congress.

In "Legitimate Concerns" news. 41% of the 899 arrested for taking part in Farage Riots last year had been reported for crimes associated with intimate partner violence. For those arrested by one police force, this figure was 68%. www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Florida Is Now a Haven for Unproven Stem-Cell Treatments. Story by @emilymullin.bsky.social www.wired.com/story/florid...

@flygirlnhm.bsky.social This handsome hoverfly landed next to me in the garden and I thought of you

🚨🚨🚨 Jeffrey Epstein during a 2010 deposition: Q. Have you ever socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18? A: Though l'd like to answer that question, at least today l'm going to have to assert my Fifth, Sixth, and 14th Amendment rights, sir.

When four breeding male Hen Harriers suspiciously disappeared from nests in May, two from RSPB Geltsdale and two from the Forest of Bowland, it was clear the females would struggle to raise their chicks alone. The odds were bleak.

I truly hate being this person, but HOW, really how can it be #r4today headline news that Nigel Farage has claimed if he was king we’d all be twice as safe & happy ffs 😫 what are you doing?

My first time trying the Today programme in months. Within two minutes, I get Justin Webb asking "if Donald Trump has a point" when he sues media companies for unfavourable coverage. And then I switch back to Radio 6.

How can we just keep seeing this every day? The numbers are repeatedly just horrific and outrageous.

Difficult to conceive of a more ill-judged decision then the one the Home Office took here. It is an affront to free speech of a kind which is really indistinguishable from what you'd see in a police state.

I grew up reading everything I could about Project Apollo. But I lived through the Shuttle program. #16Sunsets by the original #13MinutestotheMoon team: @andrewl-b.bsky.social, @scirad.bsky.social + @davejgiles.bsky.social & @richardcourtice.bsky.social podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/1...

“one officer told her: “Mentioning freedom of Gaza, Israel, genocide, all of that all come under proscribed groups, which are terror groups that have been dictated by the government.” Absolutely chilling

AI boosters, 2024: "AI will replace the need for most creative work within five years." AI boosters, 2025: "AI will no longer call itself Hitler."

Here’s the bottom line for what’s going on with Grok - if the owner of the website is putting his thumb on the scale hard enough for the chatbot to turn into Goebbels, you should be deeply concerned about what he’s doing to the algorithm that you can’t so easily see, and what it’s doing to you

A nightjar churring on Haddon Hill, Somerset. One of four recorded last night in my #BTO Nightjar Survey square

Difficult to express how I feel about those in our politics and media who are more concerned about what some rapper said at Glastonbury than fact that, as a matter of deliberate policy, the Israeli government is paying mercenaries to murder starving civilians for fun. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

the interesting thing about the Diddy verdict is that House Republicans are about to vote to take away healthcare from tens of millions of Americas

The Trump/Musk body count USAID cuts may cause over 14 million additional deaths by 2030, study says www.reuters.com/business/hea...

People in wheelchairs are getting arrested right now in the Russell Senate Office Building in DC. They showed up to tell Congress not to cut their Medicaid, because they cant afford health care without it. If you look closely you can see the zip ties on their hands. #WeWontGetOverLosingMedicaid

This is a travesty & a nightmare. The US was a founder of @gavi.org. It lowers global vaccine costs, has vaccinated 1B children, & averted 19M deaths. This pull out will cost 100s of thousands of children's lives a year - and RFK Jr will be personally responsible. www.politico.com/news/2025/06...

@flygirlnhm.bsky.social is this one of yours?

Think of treaties as like vaccines -- more effective than quack cures but deeply unpopular among the stupidest people on earth.

So Starship Ship 36 just detonated *before* the static fire test - fueled and waiting for the test. Looks like the top tank lets go and sets off the whole stack. It would be bad enough if it let go during the static fire test, but it just blew up. And it's cooking off the fuel tanks on the pad.

In fact, it’s already up there!

Honestly I still can’t stop laughing 😂😅🤣

Trump's apocalyptic NASA budget request in 7 scary charts, put together by The Planetary Society: www.planetary.org/articles/nas...

Just completed 4 hours on a small patch of Exmoor doing the #BTO Heathland Bird Survey. Won’t say if I recorded my target species but did have a close encounter with a hare. Plus cuckoo, grasshopper warbler, many linnets, redpolls and skylarks.

When did you ever hear the BBC stating that it must alter “story selection” and “other types of output, such as drama”, to win the trust of Green voters, or of unrepresented people on the left? All the shifts are in just one direction. bylinetimes.com/2025/06/09/b...

www.ft.com/content/8778... Kudos to Andrea Sella for taking a stand against @royalsociety.org’s inaction over Elon Musk FRS

Kudos to Goldberg for focussing on the essential yet often unacknowledged fact that Musk is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. It is not that he failed at DOGE. He succeeded all too well.

Elon Musk's efficiency drive latest.

Scene from my #BTO Waterways Breeding Bird Survey along the River Tone at Greenham, Somerset this morning. Highlights: kingfisher & spotted flycatcher. Downers: no dipper and no grey wagtail (both recorded in 24 & 23)

Oh! Sad news — a true hero. If you have not listened to @drkevinfong.bsky.social and @andrewl-b.bsky.social podcast, #13MinutesToTheMoon you must — the second series is #Apollo13 and it is gripping from start to finish. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w...

Sky News release audio of Conservative Chris Philp admitting that Brexit makes it harder to return asylum seekers to countries in Europe That's right, inside the EU, with freedom of movement, the UK had the ability to return asylum seekers to Europe Brexit created the rise in small boat crossings

1. This is Piles Copse, the largest remaining fragment of high-ground temperate rainforest on Dartmoor. It’s a tiny speck of green in a dismal, human-made desert. Prepare yourselves for a story of breathtaking perversity, told in this thread. (There’s a one-page version at the bottom). 🧵

Meta, Facebook's parent company, has banned India's largest Muslim news source at the request of the Indian government, @taylorlorenz.bsky.social writes in her latest newsletter: www.usermag.co/p/meta-bans-...

TANK vs TESLA "We've crushed fascism before and we'll crush it again" - ⁠WW2 veteran Ken, 98, in the tank