Yeah, British politics is simple. You just need to improve public services without any meaningful tax increases, reduce immigration without any labour market impacts, and deliver growth and you'll be hugely successful.

Autistic people seem to feel joy differently – here’s what it can tell us about neurodivergence theconversation.com/autistic-peo...

#ResistanceRoots “People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. ... No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.” — Dorothy Day

Major news on SEND funding this evening… All the details here ⬇️⬇️

🚨 Are people sicker now than in 2019? Civil servants in England are. Sickness absence rates have *risen by between 12% to 23% across the age groups*. Are things getting worse? It certainly looks like it. This is exactly what we predicted repeat covid infection would do.

2 posts in my team Public Health Practitioner (Behavioural science, poverty, and inclusion health) G9. Closes 27th Feb ce0369li.webitrent.com/ce0369li_web... Health Improvement Officer (Health Protection, poverty, and health inclusion) G7. Closes 22nd Feb. ce0369li.webitrent.com/ce0369li_web...

Labour complaining about the right wing press is like penguins saying how shocked they are by how cold Antarctica is. You'd have thought we'd have figured this out by now - it's been over 100 years since the Zinoviev letter.

Rather than bringing Starmer down with the Mandelson/Epstein stuff, perhaps we should accentuate the Bannon/Epstein (and more) stuff which talks about supporting the European far right and breaking the world system. Via Brexit, Reform UK and the new model Badenoch party tagging along. #R4Today

Please read this and then watch the video. It is just too good. I scrolled back through 10 hours of my time line to find it again to show Mark.

GOOD NEWS! A UNIVERSAL sarbecovirus vaccine candidate has officially started clinical trials! GBP511 is the FIRST vaccine to reach human testing that is intended to protect against MULTIPLE strains of SARS-CoV-2 as well as other related coronaviruses with the potential to spark dangerous outbreaks.

"We estimated that motherhood cost the average Danish woman a total of about $120,000 in earnings over the first 20 years after they first had children – about 12% of the money they would have earned over those two decades had they remained childless." theconversation.com/denmarks-gen...

People often jump to saying online propaganda is either the work of radicalised actors, or else Russia. In practice, it’s amazing how often the answer is much simpler – someone is chasing either (a) clout, (b) money, or (c) both.

We’re treating social media like a moral failing rather than an infrastructure substitute. When young people have no safe, low-cost third spaces, the phone becomes the youth club, the park and the bus pass. If we restrict that, we need to replace it with real-world belonging, not just rules.

Anthropic Knew the Public Would Be Disgusted by How It Was Destroying Physical Books, Secret Documents Reveal futurism.com/future-socie...

Kids can't hang out in parks. They can't hang out at the mall. They don't have 3rd spaces because no one wants kids around and then we are surprised when they rely on SM for connection. If you take that away, what do they have left?

Keep this in mind when people claim cars mean business — closing Central #Madrid to cars over holidays resulted in a 9.5% boost in retail spending on its main shopping street: STUDY. There was also a 71% drop in air pollution. Via @carltonreid.com in @forbes.com. #citymakingmath #citiesforpeople

"The risk is not making AI conscious, but making humans zombies, parasitized by fake realities with real consequences" 🔥 Bekker & Ciaunica popping the hype bubble and reasserting the value of care for living beings

Go read any set of ICB Board papers and you’ll find the whole system has made 9-figures worth of “efficiencies” in the year, yet the ICB providers are often still nowhere near break-even budget. It is frankly impossible to cut that much without cutting patient care.

The dude whose company, thanks to Labour, will run our military analytics and to whom Wes Streeting is giving our personal healthcare data.

Protest ICE and they scan your face. Three days later, your Global Entry and TSA PreCheck are gone. No charges. No explanation. Just surveillance → retaliation. Facial recognition. Watchlists. Revoked privileges. This isn't security It's Big Brother policing dissent in real time.

Nothing quite like rushing through legislation allowing the state to kill people (soon to be a Reform state if polls are to be believed). Zero unintended consequences (but just for the proles, the rich will still be able to get palliative care)

Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear'.

The question nobody seems to be asking. If nature abhors a vacuum, who has filled the Epstein void? Because these scum lords won’t stop their activities just because someone is dead. Look at the mafia, cut off a head and two more grow to replace it.

Well, given that latest plans for immigration is that ‘people who use benefits’ will have their settlement period extended, while ‘high earners’ have theirs reduced… …given that care/nursing is so badly paid, it seems like our government has made a value choice.

And the open access in Science Advances #Ovary #Cancer 🧪 #OvarianCancer #MedSky www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

“the study shows that cancer cells recruit help from protective mesothelial cells that normally line the abdominal cavity. Mesothelial cells lead the invasion and cancer cells follow the pathways they create. These hybrid cell clusters resist chemotherapy” 🧪 #Ovary medicalxpress.com/news/2026-02...

'Across multiple viruses, hospital-based detection & test positivity were generally lower during school holidays, indicating that the school calendar is associated with hospital-based paediatric respiratory virus detection patterns.' @elsevierconnect.bsky.social www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

In high income setting with access to the best diagnostic tests, as experienced Resp Med/TB specialist I sometimes missed cases or misdiagnosed other things as TB. It mimics so many things. So in LMIC settings not surprising that they don't get right every time. Need improved access to diagnostics!

"The team engineered #antibodies that lock onto a sugar found only on bacterial #cells, an approach that could support a new generation of #immunotherapies for multidrug resistant #infections acquired in #hospitals.": buff.ly/fPqV1cV via sciencedaily #antibiotics #medicine #PublicHealth #research

Without naming your job, tell me something you say over and over again at work. “The Money Laundering Regulations are principles based, so there isn’t a simple list of rules you can follow or a checklist to tick off to ensure compliance”.

EXCLUSIVE: Pace of ICB cuts risks slowing improvement in patient care, warns GP/MP www.gponline.com/pace-icb-cut...

The risk of the airborne transmission of disease correlates with the amount of infectious exhaled aerosol. Since people exhale CO2 with aerosol, its conc has been used as proxy for exhaled aerosol In this article, researchers propose a new way to estimate risk of transmission

"Unite said health visitors are being paid as band six workers "despite internal job grading now matching them as a band seven acknowledging a master's qualification". It claims that this discrepancy costs workers between £8,000 and £9,000 each year." uk.news.yahoo.com/group-nhs-wo...

As Mandelson case exposes the risks of using US company Palantir for health data, how Nicola Sturgeon’s government made sure it didn’t happen in Scotland two years ago talkingupscotlandtwo.com/2026/02/06/a...

This is how you do Sci Com. I cannot believe that the original version scaled it to the same size as normal wasps. We absolutely need everyone to be terrified of these things, and then we can eliminate them if we take them seriously

Loud classrooms are a key cause of distress for autistic children.

They feel we spend too much time on ”unimportant” problems and were surprised we talk about holistic or preventive factors. Their view is that hospitals are for the major life threatening stuff, the rest should be left to traditional chinese medicine practitioners.

They can’t believe how long we spend talking to each patient. Their model is one huge hospital treating an enormous area with millions of people. I see 10-12 in a 3-4 hour clinic, they will go through triple this. I talk at length to pts on ward rounds, not a luxury they have.

I currently have two cardiologists from Ningxia Province shadowing me for three months, on a state-sponsored visit to the UK to learn about our (often dysfunctional) healthcare system. It has been absolutely fascinating talking to them, and has reminded me what we do well in the UK >

Hey, several batches of baby formula from a couple different brands in the uk and Europe have been recalled for contamination causing illness: if you formula feed, check your supply. Info here: www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Top tips: If you don’t want to be disturbed by traffic noise, do not choose to live on a main road. If you don’t want to be disturbed by early morning flights, don’t live in SW London. If you don’t want to be disturbed by a cockerel, don’t move to the countryside.

Good thread about home education. ⬇️

I’m reminded of this piece from a year ago. No wonder I’m tired. learnwhatyoulive.substack.com/p/who-are-th... Can we please just remember that at the other end of this are thousands of families who are trying to do right by their children?

At the Paralympics, we all got to boo George Osborne, who was instrumental in cuts to disabled benefits that killed thousands of people in the UK, and he was booed all the way to the podiums and back. It was glorious. youtu.be/v0nMtSJDrGc?...

Damn this blew up. Please read my article from earlier this week where VA staffers told me they feel like national leadership has been silent and unhelpful after Alex Pretti was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis. taskandpurpose.com/news/veteran...

La reserva hídrica crece ocho puntos en solo una semana y 31 pantanos llegan al 100%. El nivel de agua embalsada de la España peninsular está al 67,3%, más de 14 puntos por encima de la media de la última década. elpais.com/clima-y-medi...

I really hope people advocating to ban kids from SM read this. Some kids are isolated by disabilities or circumstances. Furthermore, some kids grow up in abusive households. “Ideally, a child’s exposure to online worlds should be moderated by their parents” isn’t a reassuring sentiment for everyone

Enshittification everywhere

"Anyone who campaigns for public office becomes disqualified for holding any office at all." ("Utopia") ✒ Sir #ThomasMore, English Catholic Saint, statesman, humanist, and author, was #BOTD 7 February 1478. #Literature