Col H

'..one of those unfortunate people cursed with the belief that if only they learned enough about the universe, it would all somehow make sense.'

[Hiroshi Yasuda (保田浩志) @Yash25571056]

From a study of 349 children and adolescents in Mexico,
"The prevalence of long COVID was 11.8%.
For “persistence”, the most frequent symptoms were cough (50%) and rhinorrhea (15.4%); for “post-COVID conditions”, the most common symptoms were myalgia (33.3%), asthenia and irritability (26.7% each), and constipation (20%)..
the associated factors for individuals aged over 8 years were a history of reinfection (OR 9.7) and BMI at the time of the survey (1.1), while for those aged under 8 years, the associated factor was male sex (4.7)."

Be aware of reinfection, kids.

'SARS-CoV-2 reinfection: a possible contributing factor to long COVID in children and adolescents'
https://t.co/yGYlT1WrnH

[Jeffrey A. Hirschfield, MD @DrHirschfield]

Government becomes adversarial when:

+Outrage drives fundraising
+Polarization drives voter turnout
+Media ecosystems reward conflict over truth
+Legislators gain power by obstructing rather than governing
+This creates a system where division is profitable.
+Foreign Influence Exploiting Domestic Weaknesses

Foreign actors exploit:
Social media
Political polarization
Economic inequality
Public distrust
Weak cybersecurity

Their goal isn’t to control the nation — it’s to weaken cohesion.

But they succeed only when internal systems are already vulnerable. @realannapaulina @RepLuna

[Sean Casten @SeanCasten]

This is a window into how Trump sees energy policy and comes very close to admission of a crime. First because he thinks it's good when oil is expensive because you can make more selling it. Second because he seems to claim that the US is stealing Iranian oil.

[Plague Poems @PlaguePoems]

A new study
by the Mayo Clinic
“identified persistent
cerebral hypometabolism
in Long Covid patients,
especially those
with fatigue with PEM,
up to 2 years post-infection,”
which is a reminder
that some of us may be
post-infection,
but none of us are yet
post-pandemic.

[Anon Opin. @anon_opin]

I'm not a "cash is king" wanker, but I can't help feeling that if we were still handing over £20 notes every time we went to the bar, instead of mindlessly tapping and trying not to think about it then we'd be at the point of an armed insurrection by now

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

🇮🇱 Unfavorable Views of Israel (Ages 18-34)

🇦🇺 Australia: 87%
🇬🇧 UK: 78%
🇨🇦 Canada: 76%
🇬🇷 Greece: 76%
🇫🇷 France: 74%
🇺🇸 United States: 74%
🇭🇺 Hungary: 72%
🇱🇰 Sri Lanka: 46%

Source: Pew Research Center, Spring 2026 Global Attitudes Survey

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

A research into cat behavior shows that domestic cats regard humans as social peers rather than superiors, often perceiving their owners as large, awkward kittens.

Far from being aloof or defiant, a cat’s apparent indifference stems from a profound interspecies mismatch in social expectations.

As anthrozoologist John Bradshaw explains, cats—unlike dogs—never evolved to recognize humans as dominant leaders or authority figures. Instead, they filter all interactions through an exclusively feline framework. Behaviors like kneading on your lap or licking your hair are not mere displays of affection; they are the same grooming and bonding rituals cats reserve for close kin or pride members. In their eyes, we are simply enormous, somewhat clumsy fellow cats who require inclusion in the group.

This absence of hierarchical deference accounts for cats’ frequent disregard of commands or household rules. Treating us as equals, they follow cat-to-cat social protocols in every encounter. The “gifts” of dead prey on the doorstep or constant shadowing around the home are acts of care toward what they see as a big, furless, rather inept companion.

Recognizing this mindset transforms the human-cat relationship from one based on authority and obedience to one of mutual companionship. It turns out that while many owners believe they have domesticated their cats, the cats themselves are quietly convinced they are patiently tending to their oversized, adopted family members.

[Bradshaw, J. (2013). Cat Sense: How the New Feline Science Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet. Basic Books]

[Bobbi @kittenaround_51]

With the kids out of school for summer this mother found a really neat way to help the kids cool off and be creative at the same time. How cool is this?

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Russian psychologist spent 10 years proving that the act of talking to yourself out loud is one of the most powerful cognitive tools the human brain has, and almost nobody outside his field has read the work.

His name was Lev Vygotsky.

He worked in Moscow in the 1920s and died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of 37. He had no laboratory, no funding, almost no English readers, and a body of work that the Soviet government suppressed for two decades after he died.

He produced the foundational theory of how human cognition actually develops, and the central piece of that theory was a behavior almost every adult is faintly embarrassed about.

Vygotsky noticed that young children talk to themselves constantly. They narrate their own actions, they argue with imaginary opponents, they instruct themselves through tasks out loud.

The dominant theory at the time, from the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, said this was a sign of cognitive immaturity that children would eventually grow out of as they learned to think properly.

Vygotsky said the exact opposite.

He argued that this self-directed speech was the most important cognitive event in the entire developmental window, because it was the moment a child first started to use language as a tool to control their own mind. The child was not failing to think. The child was learning how to think by externalizing the process and listening to themselves do it.

He predicted that as children matured, this out-loud self-talk would not disappear. It would go underground. It would become silent inner speech, which is the running monologue every adult has inside their own head for the rest of their life.

The voice you hear when you read this sentence is the direct descendant of a four-year-old narrating their own block tower.

For 50 years almost nobody outside Russia had access to his work, and the few researchers who did pick it up could not get funding to test it. Then in the early 2000s the experiments finally started to pile up, and what they found was that Vygotsky had been right about something even more important than he knew.

The first major study came from Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin and Daniel Swingley at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. They ran a simple visual search experiment. Participants were shown 20 images at once and asked to find a specific object, like a banana or a chair. In one condition they searched silently. In the other condition they were told to say the name of the object out loud to themselves while looking for it.

The participants who spoke the target name out loud found the object significantly faster, with higher accuracy, than the participants who searched in silence. The effect was strongest when the spoken word matched a familiar object the brain already had a strong category for.

Saying the word out loud literally tuned the visual system to detect that thing better. The researchers called it the label feedback effect, and the implication was that the act of vocalizing a goal physically changes how the brain processes the world while pursuing it.

The second major study came out of the University of Michigan and Michigan State in 2017. The lead researchers were Ethan Kross and Jason Moser, and they used both EEG and fMRI to record what happens inside the brain when people talk to themselves while emotionally upset.

They asked participants to recall painful autobiographical memories and reflect on them in two different ways. Some used the first person, saying things like "why am I feeling this way." Others used the third person, referring to themselves by their own name, saying things like "why is John feeling this way."

The brain scans showed that the simple act of switching from first person to third person, even silently, decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for rumination and self-referential pain. Within a single second of using their own name instead of the word I, participants showed measurably lower emotional reactivity. The shift required no extra cognitive effort. It cost the brain nothing. And it worked.

Kross described the mechanism in his interviews. Talking to yourself by name creates a small amount of psychological distance from your own experience. Your brain processes the situation more like a problem belonging to someone else, which means it can analyze it instead of drowning in it.

What Vygotsky had intuited in 1934 turned out to be even more powerful than the developmental theory he built it into. The voice you use to talk to yourself is not background noise. It is one of the most precise cognitive tools the brain has, and you can change how it works just by changing the pronoun you use.

People who talk through problems out loud are not anxious or unstable. They are running an externalized version of a process the rest of us are running silently and worse. The kindergartener narrating their block tower, the surgeon muttering through a procedure, the engineer pacing a hallway describing a bug to nobody, the athlete repeating a cue to themselves before a free throw, they are all using the same ancient mechanism that builds and steers human thought.

You can run the experiment yourself the next time you are stuck on something hard. Stop trying to solve it silently in your head. Say it out loud. Describe what you are seeing. Walk yourself through the steps as if you were explaining it to a colleague who is not in the room.

And when something genuinely upsets you, switch to your own name. Ask why this person is feeling this way, instead of why I am feeling this way.

The voice you have been told to keep quiet your entire life is one of the oldest pieces of cognitive technology you own.

Most people are still embarrassed to use it.

[Pete Firman @petefirman]

Impossible Object Revealed!

[Andrew Wilkie MP @WilkieMP]

AUKUS is the biggest defence project in Australian history and yet it still hasn’t been properly scrutinised. Good on the APSF for establishing the AUKUS Public Inquiry. Submissions can be made here: https://t.co/0Pu8VqrAAC

#auspol

[Carmella @Sussex5525]

6 years, to the exact date when the Royal family instructed the UK media to open full on war on Prince Harry and Meghan.

6yrs of the British monarchy hiding 10s of thousands of emails, about Prince Andrew’s betrayal of his country and his monarchy, while monstering the Sussexes.

[Michael Warburton @For_Film_Fans]

The time MORGAN FREEMAN — born 89yrs ago today — left Mike Wallace speechless on ‘60 Minutes’ when asked about Black History Month.

[Waqas🔶️ @m0w4q45]

I was a prison officer, Nick. You can't preach "tough on crime." Your lot cut nearly 7,000 prison officers since 2010 and handed our jails to G4S and Serco. You broke the system, then act shocked it doesn't work.

You know what actually works? Lads out on licence getting their track tickets, learning a trade, coming home as taxpayers instead of reoffenders. That's using human capital, not warehousing it. A lad sat in a cell doing nothing helps nobody.

And funny how quiet you all go on the tax dodgers and the oligarchs bankrolling Putin's war. Boris took a Russian ex-KGB man's hospitality at his Italian villa, dodged his own officials, then made the son a Lord. Where's your "lock them up" energy for that?

[NO CONTEXT HUMANS @HumansNoContext]

This made me 🤣

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

One dog did this in two minutes.

[Seth @fiercepatricks]

It’s not just a rainbow, it’s a symbol of pride, hope and security. Happy pride🏳️‍🌈

[Love Music @khnh80044]

No one in modern pop music has ever come close to matching his impact, talent, and legacy. 🕺❤️

[David__Osland @David__Osland]

Taking a £5m 'gift' that leaves you beholden to the donor and trying to keep it quiet is every bid as insidious as embezzling your party's coffers for £400,000. Tell me I'm wrong.

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

If every study that disagrees with you is “funded by Big Pharma” and every scientist who disagrees is “corrupt,” you’re not following the evidence.

You’re building a belief system that cannot be challenged.