If you told me back in medical school that someday I would be running for the Senate and my campaign slogan would be “It’s me or the measles” I WOULD DEFINITELY NOT HAVE BELIEVED YOU. But here we are. It’s me or the measles. South Carolina, the choice is yours. 💙🇺🇸

call me crazy but it really feels like “World’s Richest Man Creates AI Chatbot That Generates Child Porn” would’ve been a huge international outrage requiring a governmental crackdown not even 24 months ago

Babies who get their 2 month vaccines late are far more likely not to be vaccinated against #measles at age 2, a new study reports. The authors suggest pediatricians need to work quickly to encourage parents of new patients to follow the recommended vaccine schedule. www.statnews.com/2026/01/02/m...

General Practice is being short changed by NHS England Payments to GP practices average £169 / patient / year for all the services they provide ~ average 6-7 appts / year A&E get £113 minimum per attendee Out patients £152 minimum for seeing a professional on first attendance

It’s crazy the UK has not yet rejoined the EU's roaming area. Another example of us being left behind

Saying nice things about Hitler or the NSDAP should be grounds for instant banishment from public life and relegation to jobs that don’t require independent judgment or credibility, not “let’s broadcast this guy’s idiot message and take him and it seriously.”

We never should have stopped making movies where the Nazis were the bad guys.

I’m an Autistic classically trained chef and I wrote a food aversion acceptance cookbook and guide titled COLOR TASTE TEXTURE! It’s useful for all ages, with no cooking experience needed. Food doesn’t need to be a fight. Explore eating with insight, loving kindness, and gentle humor.

The last widow of a US Civil War soldier could have voted in the 2020 US elections. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021...

At a time when social media gives the impression everyone is being triggered to rage by almost anything. - and yes many actors and bots on social media seem to exist to stir up just that - this report from Kings College tells a different story www.kcl.ac.uk/news/one-in-...

In the last two weeks, I've heard about: -mRNA vaccine to treat age-related vision loss -cure for Alzheimer's and a treatment to reverse cognitive damage -Japanese scientists working on a way to regrow teeth I'm in awe. What a time to be alive. 🤩

Yes, I feel like the mystery of why the same number of people are leaving their houses with heart attacks but not coughs is somewhat answered by the fact that you were banned from leaving your house with a cough in 2020-2021.

Between this and "superflu" the NHS is spinning very hard this winter. Few ways to interpret this comms strategy: 1) manufacturing demand crises to shift blame 2) stick to beat the BMA 3) to bounce HMT into emergency funding 4) they actually believe high demand causes long waits None good!

When the Mind Returns - the puzzle of terminal lucidity: www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cons...

Crucial on how ChatGPT detectors imperil “non-native” writers of English. Esp if these were trained in colonial or colonial-like systems based on making you sound like the perfect “authoritative” “native speaker” who doesn’t even exists. Truly, you can’t win. marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-...

As I work on my syllabi for next semester, I find it really upsetting & depressing that Trump & RFK Jr destroyed so many valuable educational USAID & CDC public health resources that I used to ask my students to read (e.g. there used to be a superb USAID health policy implementation tool, now gone😔)

Spain in 2025 - the year in review out now. open.substack.com/pub/brendybo...

"When adults learn a new language, the brain undergoes a period of active rewiring. You're forming new neural pathways and strengthening existing ones to link unfamiliar sounds, words and grammatical patterns to meaning. It's a workout for memory, attention & problem-solving.”

I would like to “like” a post like this but my last five years of social media may be needed to gain entry to the US so who knows if I should?

"For too long, Britain has been an overly centralised country, which has hoarded power in Whitehall and Westminster. Over decades, this has baked in regional inequality and deprived communities of the ability to make decisions which impact their lives." ✏️ Dan Monaghan

ok but also did you know M&Ms are why Canadian & American Mars bars are different? the creator of M&Ms encountered Smarties in the Spanish Civil War & plagiarized them but, instead of suing, the Smarties owners let M&Ms have the US market in exchange for getting to make Mars bars in Canada & Ireland

Here's a completely stand-out first person narrative I edited—if you have a wild experience you want to write about, consider pitching me. slate.com/technology/2...

Angélique-Marguerite du Coudray, 18thc French midwife who designed various innovative textile models to teach midwife trainees about delivering babies, saving the lives of thousands of mothers & infants #Womensart Find out more re women's weird/wonderful textile arts in bookshop.org/beta-search?...

Begum left the UK *a year* after the Isis Beatles were frontpage news and after other countries had gone 'yeah, we are passing specific "don't go there" laws'. So much of our politics is driven by a Conservative party that values little beyond a doomed attempt to save its own face.

Shamima Begum was the beginning of something in so many ways, one of which was 'the last government's inability to just do its job properly (in this case by passing legislation that would have allowed it to prosecute her here at home) and instead going 'no option but to undermine all our rights'.

Rupert Lowe - as Southampton FC chairman - was responsible for significant acts - *primarily of omission* in his time - that saw child abuse in Hampshire football continue that the club could have stopped. By Lowe's [OTT] standards, Lowe should lose his citizenship over this bsky.app/profile/sund...

Yes. That family. Welcome to Britain.

A significant amount of safety research has existed for decades on Human Machine Interfaces proving exactly this. It's exhausting to watch money and effort wasted in a tech hype cycle to constantly undo and redo what we already know in safety engineering.

It’s also taken out a lot of pieces that talk about the rise of the right

A reminder to writer friends to back up your own work (save as a PDF!) because publications and their archives come and go.

I wrote a reflection on how I experienced this year, as a physician, a scientist, and a human being. If you’ve been carrying a lot too, this one’s for you. Thanks for reading and engaging with me here and on other platforms. There's plenty of work ahead! bktitanji.substack.com/p/how-i-expe...

Got this fantastically clever Christmas gift. It's a dedicated algorithm free music player that you can carry around without the distractions of your phone, and it can hold thousands of songs without needing an internet connection. The UI is so simple anyone can manage it. Fantastic

I just about got my head around the toddler from across the street now has a car, but this Christmas my parents let me know he's a local headteacher and has been for some time. That was a hard one

This is from 2023 I remember how good the service was for my patients before disaster struck - austerity, money wasted on private sector involvement and faux competition. We could go back, it was possible then, it's possible now.

Lovely man. www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

I just taught my lecture course on mid-20th c US history, which starts with Harding and concludes with Nixon. For the first time, I had to pause and stress that those scandals were actually shocking at the time and, what’s more, that Americans actually demanded people be held accountable.

This is a very good point. I love that our preschool children can just play in the local fields and woods. #EduSky

It’s interesting how the risk awareness that dependence on US systems - be it in digital services, defence, or payment methods - has been internalised fairly quickly in Europe. National Bank of Sweden chief says Sweden is too dependent on MasterCard and Visa and needs non-American alternatives

Spain wastes, by some distance, the least amount of food in the EU. A gigantic weekly shop is not common in urban areas (where most Spaniards live) and people tend to pop into local shops every few days for their fresh goods.

Single dose HPV vaccination rivals two doses in effectiveness, offering over 97% protection against HPV16 and HPV18 infections. by Kreimer AR, Porras C (...) Herrero R et 26 al. in N Engl J Med #MedSky 👉 get more here 📖 read the article: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2506765

Have just had a look. It's crazy!

Really impressive how much Vance is emulating Putin’s rise to power. Including following a bumbling Yeltsin and playing to the egos of oligarchs.

Look, it's the 21st century, and a comprehensive science has been developed to explain the universe. But last year, New York City had both a total eclipse and an earthquake just prior to the fall of the American constitution, and I can sort of see where the Babylonians were coming from.

New study suggests a way to rejuvenate the immune system news.mit.edu/2025/new-stu... Stimulating the liver to produce some of the signals of the thymus can reverse age-related declines in T-cell populations and enhance response to vaccination

What the sigma is "algospeak"? 🤔 You might think sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler is chopped, but TikToker and author Adam Aleksic says we should let Gen Alpha cook: buff.ly/oa5pAo6

Good interview in the paper, this. I think Sadiq is right: London 'needs' to be less successful than it is for a bunch of political arguments here in the UK to work, hence the fictions being invented about it:

Well now, would you look at that? A massive, 4-YEAR-LONG study of NEARLY 30 MILLION people in France found that individuals who received a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine had a 74% LOWER risk of death from severe COVID-19 compared to unvaccinated individuals and ZERO increased risk of all-cause mortality.