Claire O'Kane

@PGDynes And zoom in on the Mourne Mts. to see the cretinous fools set fire to half the mountains to clear for sheep. It’s an apocalypse up there. And they get subsided for this farmland.

Not a cloud in the sky over Ireland on April 29th..and very little forest on view. Once the island had ~80% forested. Now just ~11% remains and just ~2% of that is actually native woodland. Europes lowest. We didn’t just lose trees — we lost huge swathes of ecosystems.

🚨 To Her Surprise She Thought She Was Just Studying Breastmilk … But What She Discovered Made Her Weep in the Lab In 2008, evolutionary anthropologist Katie Hinde stood in a quiet California lab, surrounded by hundreds of tiny vials of breast milk. She expected cold data.
Instead, she uncovered one of the most tender, intelligent, and deeply loving conversations in the entire living world. What She Discovered: Mothers raising sons instinctively created richer, creamier, fat-packed milk — like the quiet voice of God … a promise: “Here, my strong one. Take everything you need to grow up,bold and powerful.”
To Mothers raising daughters … the voice of God …offered gentler, more abundant flows — as if whispering, “Come close, my love. There is enough for you, always.” This wasn’t random biology.
This was the hand of God …a mother’s heart, shaping liquid love specifically for her child. Katie kept listening. She found that young, first-time mothers — hearts racing with new-mama anxiety — passed on higher levels of cortisol in their milk. Their babies grew faster… but at the same time they also became more watchful, more sensitive, more attuned to every shift in their mother’s voice and the world around them. As if the milk itself carried the gentle warning: “The world is beautiful, little one… but stay close to me.” Then came the moment that brought tears streaming down Katie’s face. When a baby latches and nurses, a few precious drops of its saliva travel back into the mother’s breast — carrying secret messages only a mother’s body can understand. If the baby is fighting illness, the mother’s body hears the cry. Within hours, her milk transforms into a living shield of love. White blood cells rush forward like devoted guardians.
Custom-made antibodies surge to the rescue.
Healing compounds flood every drop. And when her baby finally smiles again, healthy and strong? The milk softly, lovingly returns to its gentle baseline. This is not mere food.
This is a mother’s soul, flowing directly into her child. A sacred, invisible dialogue of pure devotion — refined across 200 million years of evolution. Even more breathtaking: •Milk shifts with the rhythm of the day — energizing and bright in the morning, soothing and dreamy at night, as if singing lullabies in liquid form. •Every mother’s milk is exquisitely unique — perfectly tailored to her own baby’s exact needs. •It contains over 200 special sugars her baby cannot digest… because they exist only to feed the microscopic garden of life growing inside her child. Yet for decades, this miracle was barely noticed by science. Katie refused to let that silence continue. She launched the blog “Mammals Suck Milk” that touched over a million hearts. She stood on the TED stage with tears in her eyes. She shared this wonder with the world through Netflix’s Babies. And today, at Arizona State University’s Comparative Lactation Lab, she continues revealing the breathtaking intelligence of a mother’s love. Breast milk is not simple nourishment. It is fierce protection.
It is ancient wisdom.
It is unconditional love in its most pure, biological form. The very first conversation every human ever has — skin to skin, heart to heart — before words, before sight, before the world can touch them. One scientist dared to truly listen… and what she heard was the most beautiful, sophisticated act of love in existence. If this touched your soul, drop a ❤️
If you’re a mother, or were nourished by this miracle, or feel tears in your eyes right now, let us know with a 💧 or 🙏 Tag every mama, every parent, and everyone who needs to remember how deeply they were loved from the very first moment. Nature didn’t just feed us.
It wrapped us in love first. ❤️ #BreastMilk #MotherhoodMiracle #LoveInLiquidForm #TheSacredConversation #KatieHinde

BBC BROKE EQUALITY LAW AND GOT CAUGHT Carrie Gracie spent 30 years at the @BBC. She spoke fluent Mandarin. She ran the Beijing bureau. She was one of four international editors, two men and two women. Then in 2017 the BBC was forced to publish salary data. Gracie looked at what her male equivalent, the North America editor, was earning. He was on nearly double her salary. She had explicitly said equal pay was a condition of taking the China role. The BBC agreed. Then quietly paid her far less anyway. She asked for equal pay. The BBC offered her a raise that still left her below the men. She turned it down. She resigned from the China post in January 2018 and published an open letter telling the licence fee public exactly what their broadcaster was doing. The BBC then put her through nearly a year of an internal grievance process that went nowhere. It took three meetings with the Director-General and the threat of an employment tribunal before she got a public apology and the backdated pay owed to her. The total came to £361,000. She donated every penny to the Fawcett Society (@fawcettsociety), the gender equality charity. She said the fight was about principle, not the payout. A publicly funded institution, legally obligated to follow equality law, paid women less than men in identical roles, got caught, dragged it out for a year, and only coughed up under threat of a tribunal. That is not a pay oversight. That is a policy. Gracie did not ask for a favour. She asked for what she was owed. The BBC made her fight for it like it was a privilege. Sources: @BBCNews, @guardian, @thetimes, @Independent.

I looked up to Jim McDowell. In every way. Brave. Brilliant. Best of Belfast. He loved the city. First met him at CIYMS rugby club (he used to say CIYMS stood for Come In Your Ma's Shouting) Learned from him at City Hall (Dome of Delight) Belfast has lost a giant of journalism.

@maeveconnelly7 Beautiful

Four additional things we’re doing to help with rising fuel prices: - Further cuts to excise duty - Defer carbon tax increase - Fuel Subsidy Support Scheme for farmers and fishers - New Road Transporters Support Scheme

Pope Leo's Easter message: "Let those who have weapons lay them down! Let those who have the power to unleash wars choose peace! Not a peace imposed by force, but through dialogue! Not with the desire to dominate others, but to encounter them!"

A Russian teacher conducted this little experiment to show the difference between boys and girls at the same age.

“5 mil’ on YouTube in 6 months, never done before!” 🎵🔥 (correction: it has taken years and lots of hard work but still love doing it every single day! 😁) Here’s to 5M subscribers 🎉

Your walk is physically growing your brain. That’s not a metaphor. Every year after 50, your brain’s memory region shrinks by about 1-2%. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh put 120 older adults into two groups. One walked 40 minutes a day, three days a week, for a full year. The other just stretched. Brain scans showed the walkers’ memory region grew by 2%, undoing one to two years of shrinkage. The stretching group shrank by another 1.4%. It changes how you think too. Stanford tested 176 people on creative tasks while sitting and then while walking. Creative output jumped 60%. Even on a treadmill facing a blank wall. Every single person who walked outside produced at least one strong original idea, while only half the seated group managed it. The boost stuck around even after they sat back down. A 2024 review in the British Medical Journal looked at 218 studies and found that walking and jogging worked about as well as antidepressants for depression. For people already dealing with clinical depression, a separate analysis of 75 studies found the benefit was about 4x what it was for everyone else. You don’t even need 10,000 steps. That number came from a 1960s Japanese marketing campaign for a pedometer, not from any medical study. When researchers tracked over 226,000 people, every extra 1,000 steps per day lowered the risk of early death. Around 9,000 steps a day is enough to cut that risk by 39%. A pair of shoes and a door. No prescription needed.

#stormdave on an incoming fast Spring tide .. passing the lighthouse on Inis Oírr, Aran Islands, taken from Doolin harbour. (dust spot 🫣 I know)

As a kid growing up in Northern Ireland, I dreamed of winning all four majors. Being able to bring these trophies home was truly surreal.