GET A GRIP Ireland is building a battery that contains no lithium. No cobalt. No rare-earth metals. Instead, it stores energy using carbon dioxide. The project is designed to hold 200 megawatt-hours of electricity, making it one of Europe’s largest long-duration energy storage systems.

Restoring rainforests in western Europe would also help with restoration - and preservation - globally. Some Brazilian politicians protest that it's unfair for the world to demand that they protect their rainforests for its sake. We would make a better case if we were looking after our own.

How many Irish people have ever experienced the wonder of old-growth natural forest in our own country? Given that it now covers less than 0.1% (<1/1,000th) of Ireland, likely only a tiny few. What a terribly sad thought. Allowing surviving remnants to expand naturally should be a *top* priority.

For those outside academia who are curious: as someone who has taught for ~25 years, many of us now face an existential crisis in assessing student work. Anything you haven't viewed a student actually writing down with their own hand is basically suspect; it's a shitty feeling, to put it bluntly

Pro-Palantir data has litany of errors, English hospitals admit - www.ft.com/content/977a...

NEW - and I think quite timely!!! - piece from me on the incredible air con system, still largely intact, that made Belfast's Royal Victoria Hospital a cooling pioneer. The origins of AC are in public health. share.google/2lOWbSiOFzcV...

This paper also marks a personal milestone for me, my first publication with my new German affiliation ☺️! After nearly a decade in the U.S., it's a reminder that while politics may slow scientists down, it rarely stops science.

One clearly underreported aspect of the yearly hatefest is that a lot of people straight up just leave Northern Ireland for Ireland entirely because it’s simply too dangerous to be non-Orange. Several people in Belfast have told me this. (Corrected from earlier post)

Elon Musk’s family foundation took Tommy Robinson to Russia, says Musk’s father

London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine studied 54 young people with Long Covid and found illness made ordinary life exhausting, as fatigue and disbelief left them out of sync while others moved on. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Many people don’t realise this is not a joke. There’s a chance, a slim one, for regime change in one of the parties that is part of the global Far Right network.

I think late diagnosed autistic people who genuinely believe that early diagnosis is a privilege should do the math, look up what the treatments and attitudes toward autism were like in their youth, and explain exactly what they believe they missed out on and what their outcome would have been.

I didn’t get the help I needed in time to save me from the ultimate crash & burnout, but my sis didn’t get the help she needed, either. We’re both doing much better now, thank God, but both of us had to fight for it, in different ways. Childhood diagnosis was certainly NOT a privilege.

I graduated from the school that kicked my sister out. Though I’d had meltdowns & challenges along the way, my grades outshone them. I went to prestigious schools that my sister can’t get into with her SPED background. I made it around ten years into a law career before collapsing entirely./

My sister, who is very similar to me, was diagnosed when we were kids. I was missed. We’re a natural experiment on this exact question. After diagnosis, my sister got kicked out of the school we both attended & thrown in special ed & ABA. She grew up being told she was a broken failure./

There are more actual Nazis out there than decent people think. And I get it. Their beliefs are ludicrous & irrational! You’d think something so kooky couldn’t possibly sway large numbers of people! But it does, & the decency in your heart is leading you to underestimate the threat.

As someone who regularly wishes life imprisonment and asset-confiscation on tech billionaires, the thought that they might lawsuit one another into bringing this about hadn't occurred to me.

Ahead of England v Norway in the World Cup, enjoy this classic from my old pal Patrick Kidd in The Times

If I were Nigel Farage, I’d dip into that £5 million crypto gift just to fund a video that can compete with this! 🤣 HILARIOUS ⬇️

The Eaton wildfire evacuation shelters near LA saw outbreaks of norovirus, COVID, and flu - including 11 co-infections Imagine having to deal with a wildfire AND then you're co-infected with COVID & Norovirus? www.cidrap.umn.edu/climate-chan...

480 killed in the same heatwave in the Netherlands, according to a preliminary estimate. www.rivm.nl/nieuws/voorl...

1,700 people were killed by the June heatwave in Belgium. Massive overload in hospital emergency rooms, 19,000 calls to the emergency number 112 in a day. Many brought to hospitals with heat stroke, body temperatures of 42°C. #climate #climatechange #extremeweather. www.standaard.be/binnenland/h...

#Speirghorm How other people live, such luxury.

The HSE has paused the issuing of plastic medical cards, European Health Insurance Cards, GP visit cards, drugs payment scheme cards, and long-term illness cards following a cyber-attack on the systems of an external provider

The window was broken by what now? #SpéirGorm #Ryanair

Of course Erling Haaland does actually qualify to play for Yorkshire at Cricket under the “Birth Yorkshireman” rules. #USA26 #NOR #BRA

Erling Haaland From Yorkshire

cannot overstate too strongly that Lefebvre was a Vichy sympathizer and absolutely bonkers antisemite who founded SSPX alongside another guy who was a whole-ass Holocaust denier like we do just need to repeatedly circle back to the antisemitism just to make sure we never get TOO far away from it

Amendment watch... Lib Dem MP Lisa Smart has an amendment to the Representation of the People Bill which would ban politicians from taking payments from foreign state broadcasters. Richard Burgon's would exclude oil and gas companies from the list of permissible donors.

Meta is contaminating public water supplies with deadly bacteria. Cupriavidus gilardii is resistant to multiple antibiotic agents (even Carbapenems) and can cause fatal human infections.

We used to just pick up the phone when it rang, too. And talk to our friend's parents while we waited for them to come get the phone, because there was just one household phone. Printing driving directions off the internet was revolutionary. I'm 44, btw. That's how new all this shit is.

Dahmani, L., Bohbot, V.D. Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation. Sci Rep 10, 6310 (2020). doi.org/10.1038/s415...

"Classics?" they said. "How is that going to be useful unless you're a teacher or work in a museum?" *me 20 years later writing a column analysing Count Binface's assessment of finer points of ancient Athenian democracy* "Take THAT!"

Given the operational life of rolling stock and fact that Eurostar may want to operate routes through to southern Europe in future this feels like a pragmatic precaution. Scary but sensible.

This seems like it should be making more news.

Terrra Nullius is a story that settler colonial nations tell to downplay their complicity in genocide

The government tried to ruin my career and bar me from speaking because I said something mildly funny about Rees-Mogg and referred to Dorries as a car crash. But shithouse Spode here calls for Khmer Bouge killing fields and no sanction.

Every time I read something like this, it reminds me of this tweet from a few years ago.

A thing that made the old Internet good was all the world’s weirdos came together to offer their deep expertise on niche subjects. Now it’s so much harder to find that online, and we’ve destroyed the weirdos’ natural habitats. Netflix homepage could NEVER recommend a film like a video store weirdo.

Saw a meme of GenZ baffled by how pre-internet travel worked, and realized we’ve crossed an enshittification threshold where IRL services that once seemed outdated, like travel agents, now seem luxurious: “You meet with a human expert who plans out your whole trip with you” sounds incredible now tbh

OK the Italian version sounds like a dissolute courtier of Mussolini who ended up in exile. bsky.app/profile/leon...

I love how Compte Tête-de-Poubelle sounds like a minor character in a Dumas novel.

Tell me again how the whole Binface thing isn't going to stick to him like glue throughout this by-election and beyond. It's exactly the kind of silly season summer nonsense the mainstream media like. There's no way Farage had "Binface gets interviewed on Radio 4" down on his hopes for today.

Orban’s propaganda outlets are finally being dismantled in Hungary. “Public media should not lie. We are sorry for doing it for so long,” read an on-screen message from the country’s main public broadcaster. www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

Can the shingles vaccine lower your dementia risk? www.futurity.org/shingles-vac... via @FuturityNews Yes!

Quite a list of famous people who tragically embraced quackery instead of evidence-based medicine for conditions that claimed their lives. 🛟😷🧪 Sociology

@emjreviews.com www.emjreviews.com/microbiology... www.medchemexpress.com/%CE%B2-amylo...

Despite substantial weight loss, most obesity drugs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro do not meaningfully improve quality of life and few show cardiovascular benefits at one year, finds a new study in The BMJ https://bit.ly/4gmXim6 Read the linked commentary https://bit.ly/4f67A7I

Devastating Bangladesh reports more than 120,000 suspected and confirmed measles cases since cases spiked in mid-March share.google/BZzHZLm49KSp...

I increasingly think mean thoughts about people who delay NHS work because the Provider Selection Regime procurement rules are "so complex that we need a few months to get it right." They're not. The rules are conceptually simple enough that even NHS England can get it on one page instead of 100.