Brim full of Asha on the 46

Just get an MMR Booster if you are 50+

This. The erosion in T&Cs for the Academic track means we never get back the NI / Pension contributions we *didn’t make* on low training stipends for the extra 3-5 years as Grad students. Those of us who graduated into post docs in 2009 have been shafted.

I dedicated my Honours thesis to the ‘lone remaining Sea Monkey’ we kept as pets in the Rotavirus lab I worked in, UniMelb Micro circa 1998

In honour of having my first Blue Sky Mansplainer™️ just now, I’d like to tip my hat to @shrewshrew.bsky.social and @sbarolo.bsky.social for the ‘Reply Guy’ matrix from around the same time I was throwing an Epstein Stan under the #MeTooSTEM bus circa 2018 bardoloi.github.io/blog/2018/09...

Ah, a classic Mansplainer™️ with no medical knowledge or training in medical research - telling me how I can ‘Heal Thy Self’ 🤣

The misogynist Trumpian bullying of a weak man.

Just look at the fabulous colours and patterns on this bird's wings. It could be a luxe furnishing fabric design. A juvenile Australian hobby at Sunset Strip, New South Wales. Holding its wings open due to the intense heat.

Mom of 7-year-old hospitalized with brain swelling from measles: ‘I still wouldn’t have given my son the vaccine’ 🤦‍♂️ ideology over facts. Terrifying.

American professors, who wants to come to Oxford for a year or two? Get in quick - deadline soon. www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/vacancy-geor...

The worst humans on the planet

“Maybe the leaders of our nation’s wealthiest universities can’t think a generation ahead anymore, beholden as they are to board members who think in terms of the next quarter….” - François Furstenberg @publicbooks.bsky.social www.publicbooks.org/the-misuses-...

Absolutely insane story about a middle-aged woman from Hertfordshire who got arrested, shackled, and detained by ICE and held in a prison for eight weeks.... while on holiday... with a valid tourist visa... as she tried to leave the country.

16 NIH Institutes Have No Permanent Directors — Former NIH institute director calls vacancies a slower version of a feared purge. www.medpagetoday.com/washington-w...

LMAO. Getting nervous?

It’s definitely eroded here. I can look at my post doc pay slips from 2009 & see that the pay for Grade 6 Academic has now been ‘aligned’ with non academic roles - those extra 5 years training on top of the 5 spent getting a BSc(Hons) then an MRes were not at all worth it. My empty pension shows it

"Please stop shaming people for taking #medication because there is nothing wrong with taking meds. People who tell u to stop..without #medical #knowledge are the real problem..Listen to your doctor’s recs & ignore the trolls.": buff.ly/WPvaMXq by sarahlynn358 #spoonie #ChronicPain #NEisVoid

Glad to see there will be an inquiry on these attacks and the motivations off the back of my reporting in the last year. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

“In the criminal justice system, some offences are considered especially heinous" chaser.com.au/world/man-li...

‘Killer Queen’ by Queen. (Guaranteed to blow your mind)

“The Victorian Parliament has passed laws banning unnecessary medical interventions on children born with variations in sex characteristics.” This is great news! We need our laws to affirm bodily autonomy, especially for intersex people enduring institutional violence. qnews.com.au/victorian-pa...

sometimes life is so hard and then sometimes the newspaper lets you write about Actresses

Worrying developments in NSW and Queensland highlight a masculine culture of policing that often fails vulnerable people. 👉 theconversation.com/austral...

#kakapo breeding "fridge" update. Good news: 9 chicks hatched, and 123 fertile eggs in total - including all three 4 year old females having fertile clutches! Bad news: a few egg deaths in the last couple of days. Kākāpō breeding seasons are a roller-coaster! #kakapo2026 📸: Lydia Uddstrom

This is a fascinating article from the standpoint of academic media study...but it's also, as you might expect, incredibly disturbing. We've been seeing the horrific consequences of the right's anti-trans crusade in action for years now.

I had a man try and tell me that women’s rights were advanced by being shackled 12 hours a day to a power loom during the Industrial Revolution. ‘But they had jobs and earned money’ and I was like ‘They had that as cottage weavers, but then lost the rights to WFH and whilst older/disabled’

Why would you pig-headedly ignore the voice of the next generation? Why would you saddle them with debt, shrink the job market and limit their opportunities? It runs counter to everything politics and society should want for them. For all of us. They’re the future. www.itv.com/news/2026-02...

WTAF Disney? Ads for hospital programs with sick kiddies? REALLY???? Horrified

It is a tragedy for public health & health research that the MAGA/MAHA hero Jay Bhattacharya, an author of the Great Barrington Declaration, runs the NIH & CDC “It seems the one qualification for this job is rubber-stamping RFK Jr’s agenda. He has already proven himself very capable of doing so.”

How insurrectionists should be treated.

I know I already reposted this but I just wanted to make sure you've all seen the little fella

Reminder: the reason why average life expectancy used to be 30 wasn't because nobody lived longer, but because until recently half of everyone ever born died before puberty ourworldindata.org/child-mortal...

#gaza #genocide

Synergistic activation of TLR2 and Dectin-2 by mannose-capped lipoarabinomannan reprograms macrophage lipid metabolism in tuberculosis https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.18.706227v1

How much of tech is just wizard of oz mechanical Turk flimflam scams these days, because it feels like a lot

This local Wolfdog joined an Olympic ski event and triggered the finish-line camera. This is Nazgul. He snuck into a cross-country skiing sprint this morning and raced the homestretch with some competitors before being escorted home. 14/10 someone get him a medal

Push back can work! This is great news!

I’m pretty sure #OneHealth scientists have been shouting this from the rooftops for many decades. Ping @mozziebites.bsky.social

There is a measles outbreak in London, which has been widely reported. Vaccination rates are low. And we have been warned that an outbreak could be large. Some of the reasons are due to misinformation and disinformation. Thankfully the Government appears to be waking up. A thread.

You don’t have a democracy when 2/3rds of the voters don’t get a ranked say in who represents them.

The Left Won't Embrace Explicitly and Overtly Fascist Technology That Destroys the Water and the Air and Our Very Minds for the Profit of the Worst Most Fascist People Alive and Other Core Definitions of What It Means to be on the Left

CIDRAP's Michael Oaterholm on PBS News Hour last night - "We're going to see the well dry up on new vaccines." And: "Children are going to die in this country needlessly. More and more are going to die, because of what's happening here....These are dangerous policies." www.pbs.org/video/u-s-bl...

Geez, Brits, it’s REALLY time for introducing preferential voting instead of first past the post. More people would put Reform LAST than FIRST, given the option, surely?

Historian of medicine here. Yes. Yes, they did.

You can make it even happier by buying Aliette's excellent books :)

KPMG Australia partner fined for using artificial intelligence to cheat in AI training test. Cheating is in the DNA - Fined $25m by the US regulator for cheating and lying. Fined £14.4m by UK regulator for providing false info about Carillion audits. Fines passed to customers. Firm still trades.

If Britain had a functioning fourth estate, Reform would not exist. To put it another way, the collapse of journalism directly enabled this firm of spivs and charlatans to lie their way to prominence.

We've been on the Northern Line. The idea that it's 2000 years old seems completely reasonable.

Ping @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social

Diddiums….