> At least this one is better as it’s someone making good use of what they already have and can still be used for his cage project later.

I assume that’s autocorrect! Unless there’s something you know about his cage project that I’ve not heard :).

The background situation of increasing inequality is tragic and deliberate but given that reality, it’s a good news story.

It’s the original spelling before the simplified US spelling.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Geoffrey

It’s the affordability crisis is horrific isn’t it? This is what happens when the government doesn’t act in the interest of everyday folks and pursues always held ideological ideas to cut government through years of so-called austerity measures instead.

I don’t think it will. He didn’t get any lottery funds but he is being helped a number of local charities for his Pathways care farm.

Farmyard Warm Room

> Anna Louise Claydon visits a farm in Lowestoft which is opening up a barn as a warm room this winter. Pathways Care Farm was once part of 130 acres of arable land. It's now just thirteen acres tucked away at the back of a housing estate. The farm gives vulnerable people the opportunity to learn through hands-on farming activities - including planting, cultivation, building restoration, animal husbandry and the basics of machinery maintenance. This winter, its doors have opened to the public for the first time. In 2020, director Geoff Stevens converted what used to be the coldest building on the farm into a fully insulated space with a kitchen and a log burner, in the hope of opening it as a cafe after the pandemic. Little did he know that he'd just created a community space for a problem he didn't yet know was coming: the cost of living crisis.

> Anna Louise joins Geoff by the fire to find out more about the new farmyard warm room. She finds members of the team out with the animals and hears how working on the farm has transformed their lives and helped them to re-build after difficult experiences. She also meets farmer Geoffrey Cooper, to hear about the original farm before most of the land was sold off for housing. He tells Anna Louise about his memories of working on the land with his father decades ago.

> Presented and produced by Anna Louise Claydon

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001gwsm

What's going on in the UK?

> The cost of living has been increasing across the UK since early 2021. The annual rate of inflation reached 11.1% in October 2022, a 41-year high, before easing to 10.7% in November 2022. High inflation affects the affordability of goods and services for households.

> Consumer goods and energy prices pushing inflation higher

> Consumer prices, as measured by the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), were 10.7% higher in November 2022 than a year before.

> Increases in the costs of consumer goods, underpinned by strong demand from consumers and supply chain bottlenecks, have been factors causing rising inflation. Food prices have also been rising sharply over the past year.

> Another important driver of inflation is energy prices, with household energy tariffs and petrol costs increasing. From November 2021 to November 2022, domestic gas prices increased by 129% and domestic electricity prices by 65%. Gas prices increased to record levels after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and continued to rise during much of 2022 due to cuts in Russian supply. Electricity prices are linked to gas prices and have followed a similar trend.

[...]

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9428/

> Anti-poverty campaigners have warned the rise of “warm banks” over the winter is not a sustainable solution to the cost-of-living crisis and should not become normalised as food banks have.

> Warm banks or “warm spaces” – heated public spaces where people who cannot afford to heat their homes can go to warm up – are set to become a regular feature on Britain’s high streets as millions struggle with rising energy bills and the cost-of-living crisis.

> Just as community food banks have been set up to take donations and hand out emergency supplies to low-income families and individuals, warm banks “will give those unable to afford the exorbitant cost of home heating somewhere to go once the weather turns”, said The Independent. “Libraries, art galleries, community centres and places of worship could all be used in this way, giving people some respite from the cold,” the paper added.

[...]

https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/society/958436/warm-banks-a-worrying-winter-necessity

I assume that's a joke, in which case :).

> It was in this context that, in 1998, Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues published a now-infamous and retracted paper in The Lancet, following which, in 2010, Wakefield was struck off the UK medical register for misconduct by the country’s General Medical Council. The fraudulent work on 12 children promoted a non-existent connection between autism and the MMR vaccine, used against measles, mumps and rubella. It propelled Wakefield to notoriety and turbocharged the anti-vaccine movement. He remains a headliner on the international vaccine-sceptic circuit as diseases once vanquished return because of falling rates of immunization. Many large epidemiological studies have found no difference in risk of developmental delays between children who receive the MMR vaccine and those who don’t

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02989-9

Ha ha! Long may the bees continue their reign. They've been here a long, long time.

Meanwhile, it's possible that jellyfish and other blobby things that won't be dissolved by the acidity will inherit the oceans.

> ''The exploding jellyfish population has disrupted everything from the fish sourced in the Bering Sea for McDonald's Filet-O-Fish to the beluga caviar industry.

> ''I could point to more than 400 other big examples around the world where they've wiped this out, they've taken over that, they've squeezed that out, they've closed that industry. It's just astonishing at how well they're doing in disturbed ecosystems."

> Gershwin says her book Stung! was described by one critic as a "second Silent Spring" in reference to Rachel Carson's influential 1962 book that warned the world how pesticides were affecting the environment. As with Carson's warning, people seem unaware about what is happening to our oceans.

> That's the thing. I talk to so many people, including really smart scientists who, I think culturally, just don't think past the damage. We think, eww, climate change, that sounds bad, sea level rise, but we don't think about who inherits those damaged ecosystems.

https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/blooms-blobs-and-stingers-submerged-in-the-world-of-jellyfish-20180810-h13sk4.html

(BTW yes, Lisa Gershwin is a relative of George Gerschwin)

The American floulbrood vaccine is a traditional one based on inactivated bacteria not a GMO vaccine.

The Florida Keys trial released genetically modified male mosquitoes, as the males don't bite. These mate with the invasive species of mosquitoes in Florida that transmit disease and this makes sure that their female larvae don't make it to the biting stage.

> Aedes aegypti makes up about 4% of the mosquito population in the Keys, a chain of tropical islands off the southern tip of Florida. But it is responsible for practically all mosquito-borne disease transmitted to humans in the region, according to the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District (FKMCD), which is working closely with Oxitec on the project. Researchers and technicians working on the project will release bioengineered male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which don’t bite, to mate with the wild female population, responsible for biting prey and transmitting disease. The genetically engineered males carry a gene that passes to their offspring and kills female progeny in early larval stages. Male offspring won’t die but instead will become carriers of the gene and pass it to future generations. As more females die, the Aedes aegypti population should dwindle.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01186-6

I remember the story it went on for a few days. I got the impression that the supporting cast was female and she made little activities and enrichments because the bee had a damaged wing.

Did you see that bumblebees seem to like playing with tiny coloured balls just for fun?

> A team of UK scientists watched bees interacting with inanimate objects as a form of play and said the findings added to growing evidence that their minds are more complex than previously imagined.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2022/oct/27/bumblebees-playing-wooden-balls-bees-study

That makes sense. I thought for a minute that they just wrappered the whole thing.

That's interesting. I didn't know they did that.

Did you enjoy it? Yes, it's available as a podcast, and as a live stream, a 'listen again' stream, and can be downloaded as an MP3 file. Some people like the BBC's mobile app called Sounds, too.

When they start a coral restoration project there often is no coral reef there anymore and so they use coral-rubble or something they call a reef star (also sometimes other recycled metal objects) and so there is no fish ecosystem at that location. Like any other ecosystem, as some fish move in some will be predators and others will be prey in a food chain starting with fish that eat plants and so on and then fish that eat fish. The whole point of an ecosystem is that this forms a more or less stable system over time.

Reef Star: https://buildingcoral.com

Other than that, the scientific paper I linked to is open and writtem in fairly clear language.

> Surveys of fish communities

> The family Pomacentridae (damselfish) was surveyed regularly throughout reef deployment. The high abundance of damselfishes on coral reefs (up to 50% of reef fish communities18) facilitates adequate statistical power to test for differences in community development, and their non-cryptic nature allows accurate surveying with minimal disturbance. Visual surveys by a SCUBA diver (T.A.C.G.) were used to monitor communities of juvenile damselfishes (those that had settled on reefs following a pelagic larval phase in the current season). The observer and dive buddy remained at least 1 m from the reef during surveys, in order to minimise disturbance to the community. Each reef was surveyed 10 times throughout a 40-day period that started immediately following construction, with 3–9 days between consecutive surveys. The start of the survey period on each reef was staggered across a total duration of 10 days (i.e. construction and surveying of the final reef started 10 days after the first reef was built), to allow a single observer (T.A.C.G.) to complete surveys at the same experimental time point. Surveys took up to 1 h per reef; staggering was therefore necessary to allow for surveying of 33 patch reefs at the same experimental time points. Deployment order was counterbalanced such that the same number of reefs within each treatment were constructed and surveyed on each day.

> After 40 days, the whole fish community on each reef was surveyed by dismantling the reef piece-by-piece. An observer using SCUBA (T.A.C.G.) checked each piece of rubble thoroughly, using dilute clove oil and a hand net to capture all juvenile fishes on the reef. The dive buddy kept a continuous watch for ‘stray’ fishes that attempted to escape across the sand flat or burrow into the sand during the survey process. All reefs were double-checked for missed fishes after surveys were completed; to our knowledge, no fishes were missed from surveys. All fishes were identified to species, except in cases where uncertainty meant that identification was only possible to family or sub-family level. In these cases, fishes that looked similar were assigned as the same species (e.g. ‘Unknown goby 1'); this was the case for 4% of species, whose members together constituted 9% of the total abundance. Adult fishes were excluded from analyses, as their larger home ranges mean that they do not exhibit fixed associations with reef habitat to the same extent as juveniles40. After the experiment, all fish were released alive onto neighbouring reefs.

You could email Tim if you have more questions.

If you listen to the audio Tim answers a similar question about does it encourage predators.

With some help.

Ha ha! Good reef!

This is an audio from the BBC called the Life Scientific where Physicist Jim Al-Khalili interviews other scientists about their life

> Tim Lamont is a young scientist making waves. Arriving on the Great Barrier Reef after a mass bleaching event, Tim saw his research plans disappear and was personally devastated by the destruction. But from that event he discovered a novel way to restore coral reefs. Playing the sounds of a healthy coral reef entices fish in to recolonise the wrecked reefs. Tim's emotional journey forced him to realise that environmental scientists can no longer just observe. They need to find new prisms with which to view the world and to intervene to save or protect the natural environment.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001cp9f (podcast, mp3, stream or app from the BBC)

You can listen to the recorded fish sounds here

> From whoops to purrs, snaps to grunts, and foghorns to laughs, a cacophony of bizarre fish songs have shown that a coral reef in Indonesia has returned rapidly to health.

> Many of the noises had never been recorded before and the fish making these calls remain mysterious, despite the use of underwater speakers to try to “talk” to some.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/08/whoops-and-grunts-bizarre-fish-songs-raise-hopes-for-coral-reef-recovery

This is the scientific paper on using the recorded fish sounds to improve reef restoration success (open)

> ...Here, using a six-week field experiment, we demonstrate that playback of healthy reef sound can increase fish settlement and retention to degraded habitat. We compare fish community development on acoustically enriched coral-rubble patch reefs with acoustically unmanipulated controls. Acoustic enrichment enhances fish community development across all major trophic guilds, with a doubling in overall abundance and 50% greater species richness. ...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13186-2