This human capacity for objectification, was only evolved to facilitate, tool use, language and the limited manipulation of objects in everyday life. It's a tool to solve problems, not a way to see the world. 12/

It's gone, though. So's your youth. Replacing it is other people's youth. Don't fear it. They know what they're doing. (Signed - Mark, who turns 40 in a few months and hasn't got his head around it yet.)

It won’t hurt, but for the UK at least go easy on the origin stories (‘when I was a kid I looked up at the stars/read Brief History of Time/watched Sky at Night’) - they’re not what we’re judging. Similarly career aspirations beyond PhD. (3/n)

Princeton student Elizabeth Tsurkov is being held captive in Iraq by Kata'ib Hezbolla, an Iranian-backed terrorist group. Her kidnapping and her sister's efforts to bring her home are revealing deep ties between the terrorist organization and Iraqi government. Jay O'Brien reports.

Any form of university education that claims its quality is demonstrated through commercial university rankings has been mis-sold 5/10

Interesting: a new and inexplicable folk belief appears to have emerged among Americans that being in Europe makes you somehow dehydrated

All academic publishing should be replaced with overlay journals that just assign DOIs to documents on university repositories and arXiv. These journals can operate on $10 a paper, and have already demonstrated proof of concept very clearly with several successful journals.

Untrue. This does touch on something related that actually happened, which people have apparently distorted and used to prop up the dumb conspiracy theory. I will explain… 1/N

New official JWST image: edge of the Horsehead nebula. esawebb.org/news/weic2411/

Amazing as the aurora this weekend were, an active Sun has a cost to astronomy. Here is the Hubble Space Telescope's lifetime altitude (thanks Jonathan McDowell) with marks for boosts from Space Shuttle servicing missions. In orange are sunspots, a proxy for the Sun's activity. (1/6)

A hundred years ago Nikola Jokic would have been the top blacksmith in Sombor and a hundred years from now he would be a guy kept alive to shovel uranium fuel pellets into Omnium the planet sized supercomputer. It's only in this specific era that we get to see him play basketball

UK higher education is drifting to a "2007 just before Northern Rock keels over" moment, but everyone is still refighting the theoretical and policy debates of an era that in banking terms would have been 1987.

Seeing lots of discussions about degrees with low graduate earnings. Two thoughts (1) If teachers, teaching assistants, museum staff, librarians, lower level civil servants etc. were paid properly then then the graduate earnings for arts and humanities degrees would be higher.

Right now, trying to cut immigration is a very bad idea. It will depress GDP and add inflationary pressures to the economy. Rather, we should investigate the reasons for the structural shift that has rendered economic growth dependent on an ever-growing labour force... 9/

I'm shouting into the wind here, but the HE sector seems collectively to have decided not to understand that it is paying vast sums to *lose* control of crucial IT infrastructure it could easily make and own itself, and once did. I mean, WE BREED SOFTWARE ENGINEERS FOR A LIVING.

"If someone has a Y chromosome, they're a man!!!" My dudes, if you karyotype tested every female athlete currently competing at the Olympics, you'd surprise a fair number of them with news they were "men" (by your definition).

Never forget that a huge part of Maya Moore's legacy is being one of the four Lynx captains who helped launch the Black Lives Matter protest movement in the WNBA in the summer of 2016, weeks before Kaepernick took a knee.