Sunrise was before 7 am this morning in Glasgow and we’ll have more than 11 hours of daylight today. Tomorrow sunset will be after 6 pm.

Unless you have many years being a historian, diplomat, international affairs journalist, high ranking military person, politician, civil servant or some adjacent relevant profession then I'm going to ignore the fact that you think every new conflict is the start of World War 3.

City Property has told the tenants of Trongate 103 to vacate the building by 27 March. This will have a devastating impact on Trongate and King Street as a cultural quarter. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2589875...

At last - a bluebird day! Fantastic conditions in the northern corries of the Cairngorms today. Hope you managed to enjoy a great walk, wherever you got out to.

I just finished watching the BBC's Lord of the Flies. It was such an intense production that I limited myself to an episode a week. The novel felt to me like the narrative was quite detached but I felt the performances in the TV show brought more emotion out of it. Well done to the young cast.

One of the things that struck me when watching LS Lowry: The Unheard Tapes the other night was that the actress playing Annabel Smith was holding a multi-colour pen, where you could change the pen's colour at a click. I kept asking myself - did they really have such pens in 1972?

It's not often you hear a football player described as being a team's metronome but then Pat Nevin doesn't think like most football commentators.

The pair of Bullfinches that were around last spring have just turned up again. Here’s hoping they’ll be sticking around again. #BirdingScotland

It's the first day of spring, but to be honest the weather here isn't that great. But there's a lot to look forward to this month including the arrival of summer migrant birds like the Sand Martin. And one of my favourite sounds of the year is my first Willow Warbler in woodland on a sunny morning.

Added another bird to my list of birds seen from my flat yesterday: a Cormorant flying over. Brings my home list to 38. #BirdingScotland

Operation Epic Fury sounds like a combo in Street Fighter II.

Weather presenter last night on the TV talking about seeing a bumblebee and thought it was a Red-tailed Bumblebee, but the fact its backend wasn't red is probably the first clue it wasn't one of those. From the brief glance I would suggest it was a Tree Bumblebee.

Two exhibitions to look out for if you're geologically-minded or just love art. First up is Ilana Halperin's What is Us and What is Earth, open now until May at the Fruitmarket, Edinburgh (next door to Waverley station so easy to get to). www.fruitmarket.co.uk/ilana-halper...

Tonight artist Ilana Halperin will be in conversation with Kirsty Wark anout her exhibition What is Us and What is Earth alongside curator of Earth Matters exhibition, at Inverleith House, Susanna Beaumont. Listen from 7.15pm www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Just had a group of 10+ Siskins flying over and it’s like watching some leaves blowing through the sky on a blustery autumn day. #BirdingScotland

And we're off! My most favourite telescope, the Vera Rubin Observatory, has turned on its public alert stream and boy, were there a lot of changes in the Universe last night. More coming: ~7 million a night 😮: exploding stars, belching black holes, asteroids cruising through the solar system. 🤗🔭🧪

If you have just over an hour to spare, it's well worth watching this talk from Richard Ovenden @richove.bsky.social of the Bodleian Library. Burning the Books: knowledge under attack from Ancient Assyria to the age of AI. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c_A...

Finally, the bug is back with a round of the Guinness.

I don’t know if catching a cold changes your perception of time but this has felt like the longest morning I’ve ever known.

Rare fern to be planted in Glen Affric by Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS) and the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh as part of their Scottish Plant Recovery Project. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2588500...

I love how technological this is. It's great that logistics is no longer 20 guys going "heave!" and trying to lift and move it.

After just over a week of teasing, the daffodils are finally in bloom today. #Spring

Dirty Business, the excellent Channel 4 series highlighting the corruption that is the water industry focuses on citizen investigators Ashley Smith and Peter Hammond. Read their story and the awful way waterways are being abused. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Channel 4’s Dirty Business is a clarion call to nationalise the water industry

Girl on the news watching Team GB's Winter Olympics team returning home: "I would really like to try snowboarding but I haven't had a chance to yet." How do we move that from being interested to actually giving youngsters the opportunity to give it a go? Are barriers to access being removed?

Geology: An Illustrated History by David Bainbridge, a book that will appeal to a wide audience including non-geologists who are curious about the subject. #EarthSciences #HistoryOfScience jtweedie.wordpress.com/2026/02/22/r...

My review of David Bainbridge's Geology: An Illustrated History. jtweedie.wordpress.com/2026/02/22/r...

Art Beats ICE 🎭 Check out this dance-theatre protest against the ICE murders in front of the #TrumpOut Kennedy Center. 👏👏👏

Here is his caricature portrait of two figures in #histsci, James Hutton (whose tercentenary is this year) and James Black, titled "Philosophers".

I don't think you should set yourself targets for how many books to read in a year. Just read what you want to read, at the pace that suits you. #BookSky www.theguardian.com/books/2026/f...

A book that seems to be highly recommended for geologists is John McPhee's Annals of the Former World. I see it cited by so many people. But it doesn't appear like you can get this book in the UK without buying second hand or paying over the odds for a new copy. I hope it gets reprinted some day.

Spotted my first flowering Crocus today just as we approach spring.

The ski mountaineering at the Winter Olympics looks fun, despite the athletes looking utterly knackered.

A retired British primary school administrator with a British passport and a valid visa was shackled, chained and detained for six weeks by ICE www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

@ethanrockstory.bsky.social goes looking for the tectonic edge of the North American continent in this episode of Every Rock Has A Story to help explain how the metamorphic rock schist is formed. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT_r...

OMG THE KINDERGARTEN CALL.

Delighted to discover today that the gallery I want to attend is across the road from the train station and not away up the hill near the castle like I thought it was. But it's a reminder I need to get fitter as the walk uphill wouldn't have discouraged me in the past.

Why is the BBC doing so many of their videos in portrait mode? It looks terrible and unprofessional.

A small graben in Iran. Photo is in David Bainbridge’s Geology: An Illustrated History. #FridayFault

It's fantastic to see that the protective box around Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Hill House in Helensburgh has done its job and the building has dried out enough that they can move to the next stage of the restoration project. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2587137...

Despite the avalanche risk, conditions look great for skiing in Scotland's mountains. There were so many years when we would read about ski centres struggling because of little snow. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Just as the sun rises we meet a day when we have 10 hours of daylight for the first time in many months. Spring is coming.

"No point in opening the textbooks; they were suddenly out of date." I love this. What an exciting time it must have been as the idea of plate tectonics uprooted much that had previously been accepted.

Pub that's been in Limekilns for more than 200 years has closed with immediate effect. The Ship Inn has an association with Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped. www.heraldscotland.com/news/2587090...

"I just asked Grok" someone just said when they said they had done some research.

You know those muddy paths in urban areas that represent walking routes (desire paths) that people prefer to use over the routes provided by developers/planners, why not adapt the public realm to make them proper landscaped pedestrian routes? It meets a user need while keeping the area looking good.

A crinoid fossil that looks like something from an Alien film. We’re so hard-wired to recognise faces that it’s a natural reaction to think you’re looking at a set of teeth. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Study 👇 showing ubiquity of microplastics in Scottish Dippers from three rivers; Dighty Water (Dundee), South Esk (Midlothian) and Kelvin (Glasgow) #birdingscotland 🪶

This is a model of a seismometer made in China by Zhang Heng in the year 132 CE. When triggered by an earthquake, a pendulum inside the vase hits a rod that leads to one of the dragons spitting a brass ball into a frog’s mouth. Photo from David Bainbridge’s Geology: An Illustrated History.

This is such a sad story about a girl, Heather Preen, who died from an E. coli infection contracted while playing on a beach. It feels like her death was so avoidable too. www.theguardian.com/business/202...