Update

Evening, it’d be much more pleasant out if the wind would drop so I’m sat indoors reading instead of being outside enjoying my new garden chairs. I have a fire pit too, I need to get burny-burny things so I can set fire to marsh mallows and toast my toes in an evening.Continue reading “Update”

A couple of quick reviews

Evening all,

After a busy eight days I was absolutely exhausted and my depression was acting up, so today I have done nothing. I’m feeling much better this evening so I thought I’d write a couple of reviews. I’ve been updating my writers CV and my log of submissions. It’s quite sad, I’ve had a few letters published but nothing else, except for a piece in an anthology about writing, I have two whole sentences in it. I sent a couple of queries off to local papers today but I don’t expect to hear anything, I haven’t when I’ve emailed them before. I keep looking at my submissions log and I’m sure I’ve missed things out; I know I’ve sent queries to a couple of newspapers and to local magazines, I think I must have forgotten to log them. How silly of me.

But that’s enough of that, on to the reviews. Both these books came from netgalley.com and I’ve already given my feedback on that website. I usually wait and do it all at once but I was twitchy last night and needed to distract myself.Continue reading “A couple of quick reviews”

‘Special K’ metabolite may provide a new drug to treat depression

The drug ketamine (a club drug sometimes called ‘Special K’) is legally used as an animal tranquilliser and illegally used to get high. Recent work has shown it also has a antidepressant effect. Continue reading “‘Special K’ metabolite may provide a new drug to treat depression”

Comparing the research paper to the popular press: depression

Last week an old school friend shared this article about depression, on Facebook; being me I decided to find the original paper it’s based on. Luckily, there was a link to the paper in the article itself. The article was written, or published 4th May 2016, whereas the research paper was published 30th June 2016. Reading the article made me itch at it’s stupidity, mainly because they tried to hook their ‘positive outlook’ on to a meta-analysis of brain MRI data. So, today I thought I’d read through both the paper and the article and compare the two. What I learnt was that the paper is more interesting than the article, and that people will always try to use the results to support their position, even when it doesn’t.

Continue reading “Comparing the research paper to the popular press: depression”

Mumsy and the age of fossils

When we watched a programme about the evolution of life on Earth, Mumsy asked how geologists knew how old the rocks with the fossils in them were. I said ‘isotopes’, she said ‘what?’ This is my attempt to explain radiometric dating and some of it’s uses.

We’re going to have to start at the beginning, with atoms.

Continue reading “Mumsy and the age of fossils”