Happy New Year, Sydney! 🇦🇺

Bit nippy in London today. I feel for those heading to the Thames firework display tonight - the windchill off the water is brutal.

Soon 🎉

It's Wednesday.

Right now, your support for Mississippi Free Press goes three times as far, helping us deliver the independent, fact based journalism our state needs. If you have been waiting to give, this is the moment. buff.ly/CbJHjq1

There’s a good (understandable), write up of the research on the cure for Alzheimer’s here: NGTL, I cried. This is extraordinary! case.edu/news/new-stu...

Maryland families are doing a great job keeping kids safe and healthy! Last year, more than 96% of Maryland’s kindergarten students were vaccinated and ready to learn.* Keep up the good work in 2026, and stay vaccinated. *Source: Maryland Department of Health Center for Immunization

Good morning! I’m pretty good at judging where to put my tripod, but sometimes… 😅 Just for a laugh. Yes, that water is very cold. #OceanDevotion

You, boy! What day is this?

A very remarkable woman indeed. More here, including the moving "tombmates" inscription for Gurney and her partner (her word) Sarah-Maria Buxton. (Quakers: rarely constrained by other people's ideas of what shape life should be...) queernorfolk.com/news/anna-gu...

Catherine of Alexandria, patron saint of everyone who got an interesting book for Christmas and is trying to be polite but would really rather be left in peace to get on with it, thank you.

Reposting a few of my more popular Bluesky bits from this year, for those who missed them. 4. The Empathy Of Owls...

What I hear when I'm in the dentist's chair.

The thing about the Crystal Palace wrongasaurs that's important to grasp is that they were much more accurate to contemporary science than (say) the execrable Jurassic World - and even some of the worst bollocks in the Natural History Museum. (@oddthisday.bsky.social gets this, fwiw)

The impressive hinges on the doors to the King’s Gallery at Holyroodhouse. The Lion Rampant over the Old Town and the Uniciorn over Arthur’s Seat and Salisbury Craigs.

Found some geology in the Italian Renaissance drawing exhibition today. White, red and black chalk (a carbonaceous shale, apparently) as used by Mr L. da Vinci et al.

Some photos from a Christmas Eve East Lothian walk: metre-scale depressions (?sites of lycopod trees) in the upper surface of the Early Carboniferous Middle Longcraig Limestone, overlain/infilled by seatearth, then a thin coal, marine mudstone and another (Upper Longcraig) fossiliferous limestone.

Glad I was on foot today.

31 December 1795: birth of the remarkable Anna Gurney, Old English scholar, philologist, educator, abolitionist, philanthropist, with interests in botany, archaeology and geology. A contemporary of Mary Anning, she collected fossils from the Pleistocene Cromer Forest Bed on the north Norfolk coast.

Late afternoon, Wednesday 10 December 1823: Mary Anning discovers and begins excavation of a near-complete skeleton of Plesiosaurus. Recognising this as 'the first and only one discovered in Europe', she sent scale drawings to some potential purchasers. www.researchgate.net/publication/...

Qui c'est qui veut la bonne sousoupe cancérigène ?

An old telephone phone box at Oldcroft, Gloucestershire has been restored & transformed into a mini museum. 👇 BBC News - Abandoned phone box in Oldcroft highlights 'rich' local history - BBC News www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

When fences weee built to last

Local enthusiasts in Bearsden, East Dunbartonshire, Scotland want to install a sculpture of the fossilised shark found there in 1982 where experts could see the last meal eaten by the fish 330 million years ago. 👇 The prehistoric shark found in a town in Scotland www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

When I win the lottery... there will be signs

Did you know that on Christmas Day, it is perfectly acceptable to raise a glass and remember the dinosaurs In the "Cosmic Calendar", a way to visualise the entire history of the universe by compressing it into a calendar year, the first dinosaur would appear on December 25th (at approx midday) 1/3

Christmas in (a very ancient) Dorset

Have you finished wrapping your dinosaurs yet?

"You come on my daughter's wedding day and ask me to murder for money..."

Well, if it’s 31 December, it’s... yes, of course: 172nd anniversary of the dinner Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, creator of the Crystal Palace dinosaurs, gave for 21 leading academics and other VIPs inside the Iguanodon

Not complaining anymore www.ktoo.org/2025/12/30/c...

Imagine how loud centipedes would be if they wore tiny flip flops on all their feet. 🩴

Good morning & welcome to Whiskers Wednesday You don’t have to rush into the new year. Carry forward what you’ve learned, release what you’ve outgrown, Step into tomorrow at your own pace.

Watch this at least three times. 🥰

23 seconds of blissed out baby cat

The perfect new yorker comic does not exis-------

Those magnificent ears are gonna require some extra scritches 🥰

*crab takes your iPhone* *rest of your year is just crabtexts from your old number*

At 3:20pm today, I got a text from my neighbor telling me there's a snowy owl about ten minutes away from me. After driving nearly a mile over a sheet of rutted ice, I joined a crowd of fellow birders and just bathed in joy. It was everything.

reply with a selfie/pet pic and i’ll TRY to photoshop you/your pet in movies, art, music, etc. 🩶 i’ll do as many as i have the energy to do. tips appreciated but not required. linktr.ee/riotgrlerin

Shout out to everyone wearing new socks today.

30 DECEMBER 1775, BOSTON: William Howe’s deputy adjutant general (essentially, chief of staff), the American Stephen Kemble, records “A Portrait of the American Leaders taken from facts”:

30 DECEMBER 1775, CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS: “—some days we have a number of cannon and shells from Boston and Bunkers Hill, but it does not seem to surprise any one but me,” Martha Washington writes three weeks after her arrival at Continental Army headquarters.

today on the 880 freeway I saw a sight most foul, most horrendous. a cybertruck with reindeer antlers

30 DECEMBER 1775, TYLNEY HALL, HAMPSHIRE: Massachusetts Loyalist Thomas Hutchinson is a houseguest of the politician Welbore Ellis: “Finding among Mr Ellis’s books Kempfer’s History of Japan, which I had never met with before, spent what time the family rules admit of in reading;

“Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letter, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth that can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.” ~Frederick Douglass. Image: Library of Congress.