@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

epistatacadam

@epistatacadam@toot.wales

Not a lot to say about myself. Worked as GP in valleys, then public health something to do with data of health events. Ignored mainly, you're advised to do the same. Meanwhile if you fancy seeing what I'm thinking this is quite a good place happy to be corrected as I don't know as much as I think I do. It's a common male fault. 🤣

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

countcol , to random
@countcol@mastodonapp.uk avatar

Sperm whales may have their own alphabet, says The New York Times. Unlike the eerie melodies sung by humpbacks, the block-shaped leviathans rattle off click-clacking noises that “sound like a cross between Morse code and a creaking door”. A team of boffins analysed thousands of hours of recordings and found that the marine mammals have a far richer set of sounds that previously thought, with patterns that appear to form a “phonetic alphabet”. Next up: figuring out what they’re saying.

epistatacadam ,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@david_megginson @HighlandLawyer @scottmatter @nudimanche @LeaBug @countcol isn't Cornwall a county council?

epistatacadam ,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@david_megginson @duckwhistle @HighlandLawyer @scottmatter @nudimanche @LeaBug @countcol the same is true of Scotland and Wales certainly, Unclear with NI, though in all three cases the UK government has and is riding roughshod over the devolved powers....

epistatacadam ,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@david_megginson @duckwhistle @HighlandLawyer @scottmatter @nudimanche @LeaBug @countcol just had a late thought the sovereign Scots Parliament agreed to join the union with England but unfortunately it isn't permitted to dissolve the union because England won't let it. Also England abolished Welsh law by fiat, but Wales isn't allowed to have it back, again because England won't let it. It seems England's parliament is unique in being able to just change any agreement it's made.

appassionato , to palestine group
@appassionato@mastodon.social avatar

Gaza on brink of deadly epidemic outbreak

Oxfam’s staff in Gaza are describing piles of human waste and rivers of sewage in the streets. They said people are also drinking dirty water while children are being bitten by insects swarming around the sewage. All of this makes conditions ripe for the outbreak of epidemics, including Hepatitis A and cholera, the charity warned.

@palestine


epistatacadam ,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@appassionato @palestine and infectious diseases do not recognise political borders or front lines. It might be wiser for IDF to withdraw and let aid and electricity back in.

ariadne , to random
@ariadne@climatejustice.social avatar

"‘Magical thinking’: hopes for sustainable not realistic, report finds - report says replacement fuels well off track to replace within timeframe needed to avert "
...
“It’s a huge exercise by the industry. It’s magical thinking that they will be able to do this.”
...
"Burning sustainable aviation fuels still emits some dioxide, while the land use changes needed to produce the fuels can also lead to increased . biofuel, made from , is used in these fuels, and meeting the Biden administration’s production goal, the report found, would require 114m acres of corn in the , about a 20% increase in current land area given over to to the crop.
...
This sustainable fuels target will require an enormous 18,887% increase in production, based on 2022 production levels, this decade, the new report found.
...
In the , meanwhile, 50% of all agricultural land will have to be given up to sustain current flight passenger levels if jet fuel was entirely replaced."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/14/sustainable-jet-fuel-report

epistatacadam ,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@ariadne perhaps we should all accept a slower pace of life. Slow food, slow travel, slow reading and thinking. Only when disaster imminent should we act, think and move fast. Currently it appears society does everything the other way round, fast food, fast travel, fast reading no time for thinking. But when crisis hits we act slowly, genocide decide in 3-5 years, a nation invaded perhaps go to their aid next year, our world heating up sometime in a couple of decades we'll respond....

randahl , to random
@randahl@mastodon.social avatar

Pierce Morgan pierces right through the Israeli government's claim, that they have not killed many civilians.
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
https://youtu.be/6podLdiCgaU?si=p-p8TpCRfeoKrYCn

epistatacadam ,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@randahl never thought I would have anything good to say about Morgan. But credit to him on this one.

DemocracyMattersALot , to random
@DemocracyMattersALot@mstdn.social avatar

Remember: Texas saw an estimated 26,313 rape-related pregnancies during the 16 months after the state outlawed all abortions, with no exceptions for survivors of rape or incest, according to a 2024 study. Out of the thousands of rape-related pregnancies in 14 states, Texas had 45% of the total. #NoRepublicansEverAgain

Texas had more than 26K rape-related pregnancies after abortion ban, study says https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/abortion-texas-rape-18627680.php

#AbortionRights #WomensRights #GOPTraitors #VoteBlueForYourBody

epistatacadam ,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@DemocracyMattersALot how many of the perps were convicted, I wonder. Less than 1% at a wild guess.

MikeDunnAuthor , to random
@MikeDunnAuthor@kolektiva.social avatar

Today in Labor History May 4, 1970: Ohio National Guards murdered four students at Kent State University. They also injured nine others, including one who was permanently paralyzed. During the massacre, they fired 67 rounds in 13 seconds at the unarmed crowd. The students were protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. With the current wave of student protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the government’s response is looking sickeningly similar to its response to student protests in the early 70s: Violent repression, use of chemical agents, snipers on rooftops. If the vitriolic rhetoric of politicians and pundits continues, another student massacre seems imminent.

epistatacadam ,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@MikeDunnAuthor and out of that terrible incident sprang this hit within a week.
https://youtu.be/JCS-g3HwXdc?si=3DsQQBiJoqvUuJ2d

GottaLaff , to random
@GottaLaff@mastodon.social avatar

“Tyson Foods dumped millions of pounds of toxic pollutants directly into American rivers and lakes over the last five years, threatening critical ecosystems, endangering wildlife and human health, a new investigation reveals.

Nitrogen, phosphorus, chloride, oil and cyanide were among the 371m lb of pollutants released into waterways by just 41 Tyson slaughterhouses and mega processing plants between 2018 and 2022.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/30/tyson-foods-toxic-pollutants-lakes-rivers?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

epistatacadam ,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@GottaLaff I think they trade in part in UK as plus food. Might be worth giving them a miss, UK rivers don't need any extra harm from a meat processor, the Water companies are managing to destroy the life in our rivers on their own.

MaJ1 , to weirdfolks group
@MaJ1@mastodonapp.uk avatar

#MorningAll & #TZAG G’day Squirrel Fans, hope I find you bright eyed & bushy tailed!

Thursday dawned cold & fairly miserable. I got out for a walk & told it a few dad jokes , but it just cried !

So I’m sat here hot coffee in my hand, bottle of ice under my right foot - wishing I’d listened to what my Mother said…

Have a cracking day #Today & remember #RuleNo1: Don’t let ‘em Cash-ew !
😊🫶🐿️🖖
@weirdfolks
#WeirdFolks #SquirrelsOfMastodon #TheMammutMoves

epistatacadam ,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@NormanDunbar @RosePuckey @MaJ1 @SteveClough @PaulNickson @Snowshadow @ravensrod @weirdfolks a GP partner of mine used to put his fog lights on whilst accelerating away then slowing down after switching them off.....
Remarkable how much space they left him then....
It was a rural area, with narrow roads as well...

breadandcircuses , to random
@breadandcircuses@climatejustice.social avatar

Most people like seafood. But if they knew about the huge environmental cost in obtaining their servings of shrimp, scallops, cod, or sole, they might not enjoy it so much...

More than a quarter of the wild seafood that the world eats comes from the seafloor, scooped up in huge nets. These nets, called bottom trawls, catch millions of tons of fish worth billions of dollars each year. But they also damage coral, sponges, starfish, worms, and other sand-dwellers as the nets scrape against the ocean bed. Environmentalists sometimes liken the practice to strip-mining or clear-cutting forests.

According to a new study in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, bottom trawling may be even worse than many people thought. Dragging nets through the sand isn’t just a threat to marine life. The study found that stirring up carbon-rich sediment on the seafloor releases some 370 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide every year, roughly the same as running 100 coal-fired power plants.

“I was pretty surprised,” said Trisha Atwood, a watershed scientist at Utah State University and the paper’s lead author. The findings, Atwood added, suggest that restricting bottom trawling could have “almost instantaneous benefits” for the climate.

The paper follows a study by some of the same scientists published in the journal Nature in 2021 – one that drew a lot of media attention as well as criticism from other researchers who thought its results were way off. In 2021, Atwood’s team found that bottom trawling unlocks more carbon from the seafloor than all of the world’s airplanes emit each year. But they couldn’t say how much of that carbon ended up in the atmosphere heating the earth and how much of it stayed in the water.

So that’s what they set out to do in the latest study. The team used fishing vessel data to map regions where trawlers have disturbed the seabed — like the North Sea off the coast of Europe — and applied ocean circulation models to estimate how much carbon dioxide flows from the sea into the air. They found that more than half of the carbon set loose by trawling makes its way into the atmosphere — and does so relatively quickly, within less than a decade.

“The most important finding here is that these emissions are not negligible,” said Juan Mayorgas, a marine data scientist at the National Geographic Society and co-author of the paper. “They are not small. They cannot be ignored.”

The world’s oceans are sponge-like in their ability to absorb carbon, soaking up a quarter of all the carbon dioxide that humans spew into the air. In fact, a lot more carbon is stored in the sea than in all the soil and plants on Earth. But until recently, little attention had been given to how much the oceans emit. “We know the oceans aren’t a closed system,” Mayorgas said. “At the same time the ocean is absorbing CO2, it’s emitting it.”

Most climate goals and policies don’t take emissions from sea-based activities like trawling into account. Atwood and Mayorgas said their study could help change that. “Now,” Mayorgas said, “countries can put all the information on the table and say, ‘Here’s how many jobs trawling produces, here’s how much food it produces, here’s how much carbon it’s emitting.'”

FULL ARTICLE -- https://grist.org/food/bottom-trawling-damages-seafloor-source-carbon-emissions/

#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency

epistatacadam ,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@breadandcircuses I'm glad some real science has been done. Thomas Huxley co-wrote the report of the Royal Commission on Sea Fishing in 1866. It claimed trawlers were harmless, dismissed Scotland's fishermen concerns about how boom trawlers were damaging the sea bed. Basically, by refusing all evidence from local fishermen, only listening to big trawler owners. The harms were clear to all by 1883, but scientific establishment continued to deny there was a problem. So not a new problem.

davidallengreen , to random
@davidallengreen@mastodon.green avatar

Perfectly constitutional for the House of Lords to insist that Commons think again.

And, under the Parliament Acts,House of Lords can require Commons to think again in the next parliamentary session.

If MPs still in favour, then Bill becomes law.

Lords cannot veto, only delay.

epistatacadam ,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@RolloTreadway @davidallengreen and the idea that HoC selected by a biased electoral system, where HMG has abolished the few flimsy checks and balances against gerrymandering in the UK, should not be restrained when clearly being stupid, is so laughable it would funny if it wasn't going to have such disastrous consequences for many people, whome we should be welcoming here.

sheepnik , to random
@sheepnik@toot.wales avatar

Right, I'm off to pretend I know things.

epistatacadam ,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@purplepadma @RolloTreadway @sheepnik I liked the old 10p a day unlimited travel on all buses in my county...
It might have been 50p, but it was a trivial amount, so everyone used the bus, but privatisation saw the end to that...

epistatacadam ,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@RolloTreadway @purplepadma @sheepnik it seems an entirely logical way to run a service to me. Let the staff do the human bit, help people get to new destinations, find ways to care for the lost and frightened, which is essentially what London Tube staff do, oh and it has flat rate fares in each zone, why not extend it to the whole area?

ChrisMayLA6 , to random
@ChrisMayLA6@zirk.us avatar

Why when the NHS is in crisis does the 'solution' seem to be increased private healthcare, but when the railways hit crisis point, it was finally the state that had to step in...

The solution to constrained funding is not to introduce more suppliers who by their very market character need to make a surplus out of any available funding....

And yes, in Wes' terms... if saying that makes me a middle-class Leftie - then so be it!

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/08/middle-class-lefties-wont-stop-labour-using-private-sector-to-cut-nhs-backlog-wes-streeting-says

epistatacadam ,
@epistatacadam@toot.wales avatar

@RolloTreadway @ChrisMayLA6 I understand your perspective, however I've been at all sides of this issue, as a Hospital doc, GP, Patient, and Public Health Doc (who worked with but not for the ambulance service as I did as a GP).
The problem at the discharge end is almost always either a hospital organisation issue, or a local capacity issue; Often both!
However, the total number of trouble free discharges swamps the troublesome ones, and though.... 1/2

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