BREAKING: UKRI shelves physics infrastructure projects worth £280m Major international collaborations with Cern and US Department of Energy in jeopardy, as agency pulls back funds Scoop by @francesjones.bsky.social www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-uk-r...

Researchmackerel?

One of the most beautiful sunsets I have ever seen.

Amongst other things, this is deeply disingenuous wording. The letter states (as positive framing?) that "curiosity-driven research will be the largest component of UKRI's portfolio over the SR period" Yet the majority of that bucket (61%) is QR funding. This is really conflating two very 1/2

Early reviews are in: ‘Even if they showed this on a plane, people would still walk out’

What would it take for Robert Lowell to find Ted Hughes ‘Parisian’? Meeting Tony Harrison.

creasy voted for refugees to wait 20 yrs before applying for perm. residency in the uk, status being more regularly reviewed & halved in time, easier for returns forced returns, loss of fam reunification rights, removal of support for asylum seekers, fast tracking removals & cutting appeals process

According, that is, to the Tony Blair Institute's director of science and technology policy. Gasp.

The boy Presley, backstage at dress rehearsals for The Ed Sullivan Show, 28th October 1956. Yes, that IS Joyce Grenfell standing just behind him. "Elvis... don't do that"

Omg, guys, I found the headquarters 🤔 #ResearchIntegrity #ScientificPublishing What should we do next?

"'Can 'ear a few birds. Like a said I'm not that grert at identifying their chirpings but I'm learning, like, yuh knuh. I knuh blackbirds and uhm woodpeckers..." Didn't have Sean Bean pegged for a professional Yorkshireman selling birdwatching to us, but here he is. youtu.be/m9aroePaO90?...

At least it doesn't say 'This is my statement'.

What's happening to the pronunciation of the word footballer? It used to be something close to this: ˈfʊtbɔːlə. Now more and more speakers are giving us this instead: ˈfʊtbələ. The middle syllable gets squeezed tight and its vowel turned into a schwa. Radio 5 Live is alive with it.

Red Kite The kite, with the fork in its tail, Catches the eye without fail. Just don’t be too naughty When you’re on the M40: Watch the road, or you’ll soon kick the pail.

1/2 Well before antislavery sentiment is usually identified in Britain, in 1685, Morgan Godwyn, a minister who'd been in Virginia and Barbados condemned the slave trade in a sermon at Westminster Abbey. He accused James II of making a Faustian bargain with the Devil...

Late new year's resolution: to read the word 'specifically' fewer than a million times before the year's out.

Only just getting to Patrick Sims-Williams's argument last year that the word "Celts" *really was* applied to Britons in antiquity: if this beds in we are going to have to apologise to a lot of undergraduates... onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Pick up the nearest book. Turn to page 42, and post the second sentence. 'There were separate knots of Swedish, Norwegian and Irish people, all of whom had escaped to America from blighted rural economies back home.' Was planning to read it as I walked in to work. The rain cancelled play.

Déjà vu? 'The fight against Fascism. The fight against war. The fight against Imperialism'. #AntiImperialism #AntiFascism So many topics covered in 'A New Hope for World Socialism' by the International Bureau for Revolutionary Socialist Unity in 1938. mrc-describe.epexio.com/records/MSH/...

Which leaves me wondering if he'd never been down to the local park to feed the mallards before lighting out for the pole.

Letter in Times today

"Amazing moment on French TV. A French judge explains how Trump sent people from the US Embassy basically trying to intimidate her during Le Pen's trial for embezzlement - something they've done to other judges around the world My English sub-titles 👇" @AlexTaylorNews no twitter

BE MORE BELGIUM, KEIR.

James Watson was a birder?

Ok wow—James Watson’s father James Watson, Sr. was a birder who in 1920 cowrote a well-regarded Illinois birding guidebook with Nathan Leopold, of the infamous Leopold & Loeb murder of the child Bobby Franks en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold...

i was moved into tiny council pensioner's housing one Nov; the social life amongst neighbours here is outdoors and thus weather dependent. It was bleak. But that first winter, every evening just after sunset a black bird sang. It meant everything.

Reassuring if you ever gave the least credence to the idea that reheating rice is culinary Russian roulette. I've always been too tight to listen.

OED notes of note (3) Can't say I remember ever hearing minuscule pronounced with the main stress on the second syllable, yet this OED note seems to suggest this was normal till the 60s.

Parallèlement à ce qui se passe ajd aux US, on estime que l'eugénisme historique américain a eu du plomb dans l'aile avec Ann Cooper Hewitt, une riche héritière blanche qui a été stérilisée suite à une conspiration de sa mère et qui a défrayé la chronique en 1936. www.salon.com/2021/04/20/e...

I had to take a train recently. As I sat down, a man sat in the seat across the aisle me, and a woman sat in the seat in front of him, facing him. As the train pulled out of the station, the man took a book out of his bag and began reading. I glanced at the cover and saw it was a book about JFK.

WORD FACT Muscles are little mice — Latin "musculus" (the diminutive of "mūs", meaning “mouse”). The idea was that muscles looked like small mice wriggling under the skin.

Colleague tells me someone's been bending his ear about some computing thing he's never heard of called Claude. What kind of name is that for a computer thing?, he asks. Probably named after Claude Shannon, I say nonchalantly. He looks it up on his phone. I'm right! 2026 is downhill from here.

NEWS! Keir Starmer flies to US to give Donald Trump his cycling proficiency badge

UEA study reckons Brits will try locally-caught fish outside the safe big five—cod, haddock, salmon, tuna and, ahem, prawns. www.uea.ac.uk/about/news/a...

Last can of anti-marten spray in the shop, possibly in the entire county.

NASA say that the crew member who was ill and returned to earth is doing well and now having a meal with colleagues.

Celebrate Ivor Cutler’s birthday by watching one of the most divine pieces of television ever made. Dave Allen *and* Ivor Cutler, how could you possibly resist? youtu.be/6RX1fMWkims?...

Defect to TfL? What a blighter.

Snowy bus stop, Bolton, January 1986 (Daily Mirror).

My key 'Sheds' photo, that set off the whole project Fochriw, 2021 I think

You'd pine to death if you hadn't someone to look down on and insult.

When did charcuterie—literally cooked flesh (char (=chair) cuite)—become any old mix of morsels, tho usually including cheese & crackers, as long as they are assembled on a 'board'?

🚨FLASH : on a retrouvé une manette de l'âge de pierre, indiquant que nos ancêtres jouaient déjà aux jeux vidéos.

Calling all Palaeoanthropology Researchers to please check whether this "Fast Fact" in my kids' book lines up with the beginning of human origins and Palaeolithic populations #HardScience 🏺

Can we expect Nurse to restore Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor's fellowship then? Stands to this kind of reason. And it was under Nurse's presidency that the Andrew formerly known as Prince was elected fellow in the first place.

What proportion of scientists write the names of elements and compounds with those capital initials they see in the chemical symbols for them? Way more than 50% is my guess. We need a sin tax—a tenner to the editor for every Silicon Carbide, Tetramethylene Sulfone, Bismuth Telluride...

came across the word "camcorder" there. Remembering when that sounded like a normal word

The cymbals used by English orchestras these days are so huge, clod-hoppery and swooshy that percussionists often double-strike them and they just go swoooooosh. Says Dave Hurwitz. youtu.be/g-mOVYUvX9E?...

#NowSpinning Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus. This is a marvellous gem. The composer casts a very special spell over and under the recorded bird sounds. It’s a desolate kind of beauty, but addictive and beguiling.