Voters deserve to know when they’re being misled – but right now, it’s perfectly legal to lie in a political ad in NSW. Time for truth in advertising ✍ If you live in NSW, add your name to help get this petition to 20,000 so Parliament has to act: www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/parliamentar...

Was life in Australia better back in the good old days, ie 1975, versus now. The answer depends on what you think is important. www.firstlinks.com.au/was-life-rea...

Another great reason not to vape; man sets his pants on fire. (Still, poor bloke) www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07...

Make no mistake. This fully synethic cell really is a game changer, and the that they are open-sourcing it will supercharge research on them. At this stage, the minimal genome cannot create the machinery to make more proteins. Give it time.

This is wonderful recognition for Tom Stoppard, who I regard as bein the best C20 playwright. Apparently the renamed theatre is showing Arcadia, my all-time favourite, which I'd love to see again.

E Jean Carroll must be made of steel. All pith and power to her.

There is absolutely nothing new in militant anti-intellectualism: "Thank God there are no free schools or printing; ...for learning has brought disobedience and heresy into the world, and printing has divulged them.... God keep us from both." Sir William Berkeley Governor of Virginia, d. 1677

Here is a graphic summarising data on tax as a percentage of GDP for a number of countries. It's pretty clear that Australians are not highly taxed. www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-tax-r...

Polymarket is Making Wars More Dangerous by allowing people involved in events, e.g. attacks, to bet on there being an attack. Peacemakers don't stand a chance. open.substack.com/pub/hegemon/...

"The Future of AI may be Small Cheap and Unprofitable" is a particularly interesting and relevant article by Joachim Klement. Small LLs running on laptops can, even now, do most of the work as well as data centre LLM. Obvious implications www.reuters.com/commentary/r...

Statistical fallacies that you will want to avoid. Source: buff.ly/2YCJBHK

The world's smallest QR code: 50nm x 50nm, done using a scanning tunneling electron microscope. Why? Because it's cool pushing around single atoms ia.acs.org.au/article/2026...

🔥 Green heron using a piece of bread to lure fish

How many elementary particles are there in physics? A whole lot more than you think! (interesting, but otherworldly) www.quantamagazine.org/how-many-ele...

Nor the xenophobic poison that has been enabled around the world.

I suspect it's not widely known that (or how much) genetic variation that would otherwise be deleterious is "hidden" by buffering. Much of that is accomplished by a protein called Hsp90. I've written a feature for Nature about it. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

There is a real chance of an oral vaccine against one of the main causes of travellers' diarrhoea, a pathogenic subspecies of E. coli (which normally lives in our guts without issue). medium.com/microbial-in...

Graphic showing countries with the most high-speed rail. Australia has none. To be fair, most in the list have higher population densities and smaller size, but not all. It took 50 years to get the Eastern Suburbs railway built in Sydney not holding breath www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-count...

Old trees are valuable. There is hardly anything else on Earth that harbors such a rich community of life within a single living organism. David Attenborough

#GraceTame has a series of podcasts on @ABCaustralia on growing up as an autistic woman. The masking that goes on, and the overwhelm. Just caught the first episode. Vulnerability and enormous strength. Respect. www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

Papua New Guinea has detailed its plans to protect approximately 200,000 km² of Pacific Ocean waters from fishing and all other destructive human activity. Papua New Guinea sits within the Coral Triangle, the global epicentre of marine biodiversity. oceanographicmagazine.com/news/papua-n...

@katechaneymp.bsky.social has released a very useful policy paper on AI use and governance in Australia, to the benefit of Australians. Well worth a look. We need to get a wriggle on. www.katechaney.com.au/ai_policy_pa...

Fact.

@catgyoung.bsky.social www.npr.org/2026/06/01/n...

I think there is something rather old-school and wonderful about a national/international newspaper covering the outcome of a national spelling bee www.nytimes.com/live/2026/05...

A decade ago, we discovered an exceptionally exciting exoplanet that could be the best candidate for hosting alien life. Now we’re about to find out if it really is

A woman is killed by an intimate partner or former partner every 9 days (data from www.ourwatch.org.au/quick-facts). it is well past high time for a Royal Commision on Femicide www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This nice post nicely makes the case that walking is better than sitting for idea generation ("divergent thinking"), but it does over-egg the case a bit. For example, I'm not sure those historical examples are right. Recommended. twitter.com/ihtesham2005...

The BBC uses robo-cameras disguised as dung heaps to film wildlife up close, blending into any terrain...#WildlifePhotography

From an article in @guardian a company in Japan is manufacturing a Human Washing Machine. There is a pic of a human in said machine. Once you've encountered Japanese high-tech toilets the machine seems somewhat less unbelievable, but really 🤔 www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Ambush predator

The 'haves' squawking about their housing investments while the have-nots watch their flimsy shelters being destroyed is such a stain on Australia as winter approaches. What are we becoming? Such cruelty and social inequity 😢. #UnAustralian

How to build a good prime minister: We've fucked it up not once, not twice, but at least seven times in succession. Maybe let's do it differently this time iandunt.substack.com/p/how-to-bui...

Stephen Colbert and David Letterman throwing things off the Ed Sullivan Theater. Colbert: “Anything you’d like to say, Dave?” Letterman: “In the words of the great Edward R. Murrow to CBS: ‘Good night and good luck, motherfuckers.’”

It's right that lists are a bit silly, but they're great for sparking discussion. Like: Jane Eyre above Pride & Prejudice? I liked both, but that's a bit anti-canonical. No Slaughterhouse Five? No The Blue Flower? etc. www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...

Chinese researchers have created a bamboo-based plastic as strong as petroleum-based plastics, which can fully biodegrade in soil in just 2 months phys.org/news/2025-10...

Some useful public speaking tips from Freud here.

I came across an interesting Ethiopian-Jewish recipe requiring korarima (Ethiopian cardamom). No shops in Perth stock it, so went online and also got berbere (compound chill spice). I now have 1kg of berbere. Recipe suggestions.

Craig Venter's Celera wanted to patent genes, which motivated his company's effort. Business v Science. An awkward draw. Celera used HGP's mapping based scaffold, but shotgun sequencing is how it's largely done now. That said, long-reads rule.

Unlike our, very oxygen hungry eyes, birds' eyes do not use oxygen, required by the TCA cycle, but rely only on glycolysis, which is way more inefficient (and needs huge amounts of glucose) www.newscientist.com/article/2512...

Pollution levels in Paris after 10 years of advancing sustainable transport.

IT layoffs due to #AI, due post covid era renormalising, or pushing workers to adapt fast? All all three? theconversation.com/meta-and-mic...

Fantastic news, throwing phones away when the battery dies is quite ridiculous. We don't need super thin phones, we need phones we can repair.

This article makes a strong case that full self-driving ala Tesla (with just cameras backed by AI) is unachievable in the wildly unpredictable setting of real traffic. Based on Floridi conjecture that AI can have scope or accuracy, but not both. www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/this-could...

Worse still, the anti-vax meme has reverberated around the world causing utterly preventable disease among the susceptible.

i’ve worked in tech more than 20 years. it has never been more ridiculous.

In this article, Joachim Klement looks at the influence of imports different commodities on inflation in the EU when the items are in short supply. No guesses for guessing No 1. Coffee is #4 ahead of coal, and cocoa #6. European priorities 😉 klementoninvesting.substack.com/p/which-impo...