🌍 #WorldMicrobiomeDay 2025 At @halllab.bsky.social we’re uncovering how microbes - right from day one - help shape the gut, strengthen immunity, and protect against infection. We're exploring how, when, and which microbes colonise - in order to develop interventions for a healthier start to life.

An excellent rapid response from Katharine Cheston to this awful BMJ opinion piece.

Raising awareness of things is difficult now because people are trying to raise awareness of all sorts of things every day and week. It's just a constant cacophony of appeals to our awareness and there is only so much awareness to go around.

Such good weather and sunny evenings lately.

It could be if it is gut microbiome research. Then the toilet is the source of all knowledge.

Is this strike in a Paris library the first to improve indoor air quality? Most interesting because no one in Britain seems to have hear about indoor air quality yet. Screenshot of the google translated article in English. www.revolutionpermanente.fr/Maux-de-tete...

Blaming Ukraine for starting the war is the "She shouldn't have dressed provocatively" of international politics.

"But, for some, those background noises can become so overwhelming that they distract them from recognising voices or alerts." This is interesting about auditory processing disorder. I've always experienced something like this in noisy environments. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

💡 Targeting gut microbiota may restore gut-liver axis homeostasis in CLD! Strategies like prebiotics, probiotics, FMT & tailored antibiotics could prevent Enterococcus dominance & slow disease progression. Huge thanks to everyone involved - this was a massive team effort!

📊 Key findings: ✅ Advanced cirrhosis = higher Enterococcus, lower beneficial anaerobes (Roseburia, Ruminococcus, Faecalibacterium) ✅ Microbial shifts correlate with systemic inflammation & gut barrier dysfunction ✅ Lower urinary hippurate & TMAO suggest microbial metabolic changes 📉 #ACLF

Really excited that @matthewjdalby.bsky.social is able to share this exciting collaborative study with @drvishalcpatel.bsky.social - its been a long-time coming! We explore how gut #microbiome alterations drive systemic inflammation & immune dysfunction in chronic liver disease (CLD) #LiverDisease

This is my great new preprint with @drvishalcpatel.bsky.social and @halllab.bsky.social. We investigated the gut microbiota in patients with liver disease in which we show an increasing dominance of Enterococcus in the gut of patients with more severe liver disease. www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

Potato the cat keeping me company while I'm resting.

""DeepSeek has been such an amazing counsellor. It has helped me look at things from different perspectives and does a better job than the paid counselling services I have tried," says Holly..." Will AI be replacing therapists? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Nuking climate change with a truly massive nuclear bomb under the ocean is certainly an inventive idea. youtu.be/aGPKpx6pMko?...

One of my sansevieria plants is growing flower buds. Drops of nectar form under the flower buds before they open.

The Science Media Centre continues their malignant influence on journalists promoting some really bad people.

I think it's normal for society to be more willing to make accommodations for larger majorities of people. I don't see this as a personal victimisation of myself.

"Air pollution and brain damage: what the science says Epidemiological studies have linked dirty air to dementia and other brain disorders. Now researchers are trying to determine how pollutants do their damage, and how much harm they cause." Seems worth reducing it. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Experts: "Public health is political." *politicization of public health* Politicians: "I can do public health now?" Experts:

Cochrane is continuing to protect bad science on this topic. But unfortunately their authority still carries weight.

Experts: "Public health is political." *politicization of public health* Politicians: "I can do public health now?" Experts:

On social media a misunderstanding can make it around the world before the correction has gotten its boots on.

"They were minted between 22 and 79 CE" Time for the Bank of England to release some 2000 year anniversary commemorative coins?

We need high levels of automated air filtration and ventilation in medical facilities because a lot of medical staff just aren't going to understand or care about infection control.

It's a good quote from Richard Horton but it would have been better if he'd tried to do something about it since then.

"From 2005 to 2020, the share of households that didn’t purchase any meat at the grocery store increased from 4.1 to 4.6 percent ... The share of households purchasing no animal products... doubled, from a tiny 0.5 percent to a still-tiny 1 percent." New diet data. www.vox.com/future-perfe...

Science as a field can endeavour to be impartial though. But if you make science a partisan activity those who disagree with you politically will stop trusting scientific evidence because they won't trust you to be impartial. Probably with some justification.

Undersea cables drama going on in the Baltic.

First snow of the winter falling this evening.

"Trump and the triumph of illiberal democracy How Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic establishment sealed the fate of the progressive regime they sought to renew." Interesting read. I'm not quite so pessimistic as the future seems quite unstable. www.newstatesman.com/internationa...

A new fragrant orchid. Oncidium Katrin Zoch. Fragrance is difficult to describe but the flowers smell something a bit like sweets or chocolate.

This Pilea peperomioides keeps getting taller. Now relying on a bamboo cane to hold it up.

This is the first year that my little olive tree in the back yard has actually produced some olives. I don't know whether there is much flesh on these olives as they are quite small. Perhaps enough to make a teaspoon of olive oil.

Good to see so many cows grazing now up in the Yorkshire Dales.

The slippery slope argument isn't always a fallacy. Some slopes really are quite slippery.

Probably the only place where you are talking to the public is Facebook.

Thanksgiving cactus flowers opening this week.

"‘Anticyclonic gloom’ blamed as English village sees no sunshine since October" Having over a week of identical unchanging weather seems quite weird in Britain. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024...

Thinking today that one of the most important skills required to cope with chronic illness is developing the ability to mentally cope with missing out on things.

“The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.” Officially become a supercentenarian with this one simple trick. theconversation.com/the-data-on-...

I think the degree to which we remember and commemorate terrible events and disasters is the degree to which we can give meaning to them afterwards. We purposely forget pandemics because they are just random death and suffering without meaning. It upsets our minds to dwell on such things.

Watching a couple of goldfinches outside the kitchen window today. I left the dead knapweed seed heads on from last autumn and they seem to be enjoying them. I don't think there can be any seeds left in them so perhaps they are eating bugs hiding in there.

My new amaryllis bulb. Planted on the 16th of November it is really starting to grow rapidly now.

An interesting overview of some more recent discoveries about Neanderthal life and behaviour. Much more human than we used to think. knowablemagazine.org/article/soci...

What is absolute ability vs usable ability in ME/CFS? All physical and mental exertion drains your energy and can trigger symptoms and trigger post-exertional malaise. So your ability to do one particular thing depends on all the other things you have to do.

I was thinking about how one of the reasons ME/CFS is particularly difficult to manage as a patient is because the illness consists of several fluctuating patterns of symptom severity that overlay each other.

When is a symptom a symptom in ME/CFS and what is severity? Some symptoms I experience only rarely because I avoid too much exertion. But if I tried to live a semi normal life I'd probably suffer from them regularly. Pacing can effectively hide symptoms.

Top work by @exceedhergrasp1.bsky.social and colleagues publishing this in Mayo Clinical Proceedings. "Diagnosis and Management of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S002...

"We think that behavior and beliefs ensure some people don't recover." This is shameful stuff. It is the same patient-blaming nonsense that has been pushed on patients with ME/CFS now being targeted at Long Covid.