World endures ‘decade of deadly heat’ as 2024 caps hottest years on record: ‘The top 10 hottest years on record have happened in the last 10 years’.

Quitting social media gave me a new creed: only disconnect: ‘…our virtual selves are not our inner selves, but behaviours drawn out from us by the social media platforms’.

Is Immersion the Best Way to Learn a Language?: It’s helpful, but only if you proactively engage with it.

2024’s most costly climate disasters killed 2,000 people and caused $229bn in damages, data shows

Scientist’s ‘ruthlessly imaginative’ 1925 predictions for the future come true – mostly: How much did Prof Archibald Montgomery Low get right?

Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates: Apparently it’s easier to rewrite science that get Excel to stop auto-converting “MARCH1” into a date.

Scrabble, Anonymous: The life of a Scrabble addict.

I’m Tired of Pretending Physical Media Isn’t Still Better Than Streaming Digital: I’m too clutter-phobic to indulge in much physical media, but its hard to deny you tend to get a higher quality and less annoying experience if you do.

Revealed: 1.5m children in England studying in unfit school buildings: Years of insufficient budgets mean that buildings used for services like education, health and justice in the UK are literally crumbling.

Todayspaper | The Guardian: Some of the stories that make up the physical version of the Guardian newspaper, updated each day the paper comes out.

Joyful, joyful: The tradition of door-to-door carolling does sound extremely weird when put like this.

‘Wild west’: experts concerned by illegal promotion of weight-loss jabs in UK: Companies are effectively flouting the ban on marketing prescription drugs direct to the public.

Older music has been getting a second life on TikTok, data shows: An increasing amount of TikTok videos use music that’s at least 5 years old.

Indian Ocean tsunami: how survivors found love after Boxing Day disaster: Life in Indonesia, 20 years later.

Scientists Quantified The Speed of Human Thought, And It’s a Big Surprise: Apparently our brains process information at the minuscule rate of 10 bits per second - to be fair I regularly feel like a 1970s computer could best me.

AdGuard Mail — a new AdGuard product to protect your email: AdGuard enters into the cadre of services like SimpleLogin and Addy by offering a product designed to keep your email private.

Just 2% of some key trains on London to Manchester line run on time: The worst offender being the 8:53am from London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly.

£100m spent in England on failed efforts to block children’s Send support: Only 1.2% of council’s decisions to refuse to provide special educational funding for children are supported by courts when appealed.

making a website is hard: cathode ray dude bemoans the lack of a modern Microsoft Frontpage or Dreamweaver equivalent.

Welcome to Britain’s Victorian Christmas, where volunteers in Santa hats fulfil the basic functions of the state: A decent country would not rely on the whims of charitable donations to meet the basic human needs of its population.

Photographs reveal first glimpse of uncontacted Amazon community: Photos of the Massaco emerge - one of 60+ Amazonian communities who have no contact with the outside world.

Proud to be a blockhead: Doctorow covers several important concepts, including that of vocational awe: ‘People make art because it matters to them, and this trait makes workers terribly exploitable’.

Mobile Communications Best Practice Guidance: Largely sensible advice from the US cyber defence agency on keeping your mobile communications secure.

Louisiana forbids public health workers from promoting COVID, flu and mpox shots: Public health agencies are no longer allowed to promote public health.

The billionaires are full of bull: ‘You don’t earn trust with “balance” – especially not between two imbalanced things – you earn it by consistently providing evidence to support your findings.’