https://www.uel.ac.uk/

PRESS RELEASE: Women are missing out at work not just because of pay gaps or bias, but because they simply do not have the same time as men to compete. That is the conclusion of a new study co-authored by Professor Toyin Adisa of the University of East London, published in the International Journal of Management Reviews.

The paper analysed 88 studies and found that women’s working lives are shaped by a constant “time squeeze” caused by unpaid care, domestic work and rigid social expectations.

A double workload. This means many women are effectively working two jobs. As a result, they have less time for networking, training, visibility and progression, all of which are critical for getting ahead at work.

The researchers argue that this “hidden time gap” is a major but overlooked barrier to inclusion. Even when organisations offer flexible working, it often fails to solve the problem because the underlying expectations about availability and productivity remain unchanged.

A global pattern. While the study focuses on African workplaces, the authors say the findings reflect a wider global issue. Many organisations are still built around an “ideal worker” who is always available, with few responsibilities outside work. In reality, that model excludes large numbers of women everywhere.

The study sets out five ways time affects women at work, from life-stage pressures such as motherhood to wider historical and cultural factors that shape who is expected to do care work. Across all of them, the result is the same: less opportunity, less recognition and less inclusion.

Rethinking how work is organised. The authors say employers need to rethink how work is organised, not just offer surface-level fixes. Suggested changes include better childcare support, fairer workloads and more realistic expectations about working time.

Professor Toyin Adisa, of the Royal Docks School of Business and Law at UEL, said, “Women are not falling behind because they lack ambition or ability. They are falling behind because they are carrying a second shift that workplaces still largely ignore. If we want real inclusion, we have to stop designing jobs around the assumption that everyone has unlimited time.”

No quick fixes. The study warns there are no quick fixes. While measures like flexible working and childcare support can help, the problem runs much deeper. Women’s disadvantage at work is rooted in how time is distributed across society, shaped by entrenched gender roles, cultural expectations and organisational norms.

Professor Toyin Adisa said, “If we are serious about inclusion, we cannot rely on small policy tweaks. We have to rethink how work is organised and how care is valued across society.”

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1121888

INTRO: Placing fruit and vegetable sections near supermarket entrances increases the amount purchased and may improve the quality of women’s diets, according to a new study funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

Published in the journal PLOS Medicine, the results of the study showed that the placement of such produce near store entrances led to approximately 2,525 extra portions of fruit and vegetables being purchased per store, per week. This contrasted with substantial declines in population-level fruit and vegetable purchasing and intake over the study period, which coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis.

The researchers say that Government regulations to curb the promotion of unhealthy foods should consider requiring the placement of a fruit and vegetable section at store entrances – as well as limiting the placement of unhealthy foods in locations such as checkouts, aisle-ends and store entrances to maximise their health benefit... (MORE - details, no ads)

See? I'm not so weird afterall! Although maybe I should invest in a cheap flip phone. You know...like when I get swept off to the hospital for 6 days! lol

The reason I never owned a smartphone was its audacious and unbeckoned intrusion into our personal lives. To me it is being hyperconnected--so connected and dependent on a gadget that you hardly have time for yourself. I cherish my privacy and my solitude. And when I am physically somewhere, that's the only place I want to be. Not on the internet, or talking to someone on the phone, or texting. We have to have the freedom to say no to the next new technology, even when everyone else is thoughtlessly jumping on the bandwagon. And I gladly opted out.

Here's 16 celebrities who live without smartphones:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/kristenharris1/...NlScS-rr-g

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/03/...-squashed/

EXCERPTS: Three-hundred million years ago, the skies of the late Palaeozoic era were buzzing with giant insects. Meganeuropsis permiana, a predatory insect resembling a modern-day dragonfly, had a wingspan of over 70 centimeters and weighed 100 grams. Biologists looked at these ancient behemoths and asked why bugs aren’t this big anymore. Thirty years ago, they came up with an answer known as the “oxygen constraint hypothesis.”

For decades, we thought that any dragonflies the size of hawks needed highly oxygenated air to survive because insect breathing systems are less efficient than those of mammals, birds, or reptiles. As atmospheric oxygen levels dropped, there wasn’t enough to support giant bugs anymore. “It’s a simple, elegant explanation,” said Edward Snelling, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Pretoria. “But it’s wrong.”

Unlike mammals, insects don’t have a centralized pair of lungs and a closed circulatory system that delivers oxygen-rich blood to their tissues. “They breathe through internalized tubing called the tracheal system,” Snelling explained.

[...] Here, oxygen delivery relies on passive diffusion to cross the final barrier into the tissue. The problem with diffusion is that it’s notoriously slow. The oxygen constraint hypothesis argued that the larger the insect grows, the further the oxygen must travel to reach the deepest tissues. “As the insects get bigger and bigger, the challenge of diffusion becomes greater,” Snelling said.

[...] The late Palaeozoic was a time of hyperoxia, with atmospheric oxygen levels peaking around 30 percent, compared to the 21 percent we breathe today. Hyperoxia was supposed to let insects bypass the limitations of their breathing system and grow larger. But recently, Snelling led a team of researchers that tested this idea, as they describe in a recent Nature study. It just didn’t hold up.

[...] To put it simply, if a giant insect needed more oxygen, evolving a denser network of tracheoles would be a cheap and effective physiological upgrade. There was likely no anatomical roadblock stopping them from doing so, and they probably wouldn’t have to sacrifice flying power to achieve it.

But if the lack of oxygen didn’t kill the giant bugs, we’re still faced with an outstanding question: What’s stopping our present bugs from evolving to the size of a pigeon? “There are a few hypotheses that are out there,” Snelling said.

[...] One hypothesis is the rise of aerial vertebrate predators. The fossil record shows a decoupling between maximum insect wing length and atmospheric oxygen levels starting at around 135 million years ago, which roughly coincides with the evolution of birds and, later, bats. “This predatory pressure didn’t exist 300 million years ago,” Snelling said.

[...] Then there’s an issue of growing XL-sized exoskeletons. Insects must molt to grow. When they shed their hard outer shells, they are temporarily soft and squishy until the new exoskeleton hardens. Surface tension and basic structural mechanics can hold this soft body together in a tiny beetle, but they might struggle to do so if the bug is much larger... (MORE - missing details)

PAPER: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10291-3

https://theconversation.com/new-discover...led-277844

EXCERPTS: For much of the 20th century, anatomical investigation slowed dramatically. By the 1960s, relatively few cadaveric studies were being published worldwide. The assumption was simple: the human body had already been mapped.

Medical education continued, of course, but much of it focused on teaching established knowledge rather than generating new anatomical observations. That apparent stability masked a deeper problem: much of the knowledge had been inherited rather than tested.

Improved imaging techniques, renewed cadaveric research and a growing awareness of anatomical variation have triggered something of a renaissance in anatomical study. Structures once overlooked or poorly described are being re-examined. Far from being finished, anatomy is rediscovering just how incomplete its map of the human body may be.

One of the most important shifts in modern anatomy has been recognising that variation is the rule rather than the exception. Textbooks present a “typical” body for teaching, but real human anatomy sits along a spectrum.

Human anatomy varies across several dimensions at once. Differences exist between males and females, across the lifespan as the body develops and ages, and between populations shaped by genetics and environment.

Beyond these broad patterns lies enormous individual variation: blood vessels may follow different routes, muscles may be absent or duplicated, and even the folding patterns of the brain differ from person to person. The “standard” anatomy shown in textbooks is therefore best understood not as a universal blueprint, but as a simplified reference point within a wide biological range.

This variation matters far beyond the operating theatre. Differences in nerves, vessels and joints can alter how diseases reveal themselves, influence how scans are interpreted and shape patterns of movement and injury.

Subtle differences in joint alignment may affect the risk of conditions, such as osteoarthritis, while variations in vascular anatomy can influence susceptibility to stroke or aneurysm. Understanding anatomical diversity is therefore central not only to surgery, but also to diagnosis, medical imaging, biomechanics and the study of disease itself.

Even after centuries of study, the human body continues to yield new anatomical insights. Structures once overlooked [...] are being re-examined... (MORE - missing details)

“There is a temporal style of the world, and time remains the same because the past is a former future and a recent present, the present an impending past and a recent future, the future a present and even a past to come; because, that is, each dimension of time is treated or aimed at as something other than itself and because, finally, there is at the core of time a gaze.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

In spite of our current physicalist worldview of seeing time as an absolute and objective property of the world, a sort of space where events are imagined to objectively occur in sequence, we seem to never get around its fundamental presupposition of subjectivity. At the heart of time lies this "gaze", a self-same phenomenal experience of past, present, and future all at once and interrelated to each other. This is not the eternal staticity and simultaneity of events proposed by physics, like a role of film containing the entire movie at once. Nor is it the flow of some brain-generated hallucination. Rather, as beings constantly engaged and embedded in the world, time happens inseparably from our own experience. In its unique qualities of duration and change and concurrence and contingency and possibility it saturates the world with dynamic creativity and a transcendent coalescence that both involves us and expresses itself thru our conscious being.

“Temporality temporalizes as a future which makes present in the process of having been.”— Martin Heidegger

Contemplating the mystery of light's information carrying capacity last nite in bed. I have yet to hear from science a good explanation for it. How mere electromagnetic waves in space can carry all the information needed to reconstitute an exact image of any scene from any angle or distance for an observer. And it's not even necessary for it to enter an eye. Just hold up a lens and you can project that exact image on a blank piece of paper! How does it do this?

Wave forms only speak the language of frequency and wavelength and amplitude. They totally lack the means to so easily and accurately reproduce the exact imagery of the last thing they bounced off of. And yet they do! It's almost like light carries the memory of where it last touched matter, transmitting thruout space a seamless omni-directionally projected movie of everything around us for miles. You have only to move your position slightly and you will continue seeing this streaming projection of the same scene albeit from a slightly different spatial perspective. You can even magnify this field of light waves with a telescope or a microscope and you will see more even information contained in it. More details not even visible to our mere eyes! There's something fishy going on here. But alas I'm totally befuddled!

And here's a Reddit comment from an engineer about how light interacts with matter:

"It doesn’t actually “bounce.” Light — more generally electromagnetic radiation — interacts with the matter (it’s simpler if we limit the conversation to conductors) it impinges on by inducing currents and charge distributions. These, in turn, generate their own electromagnetic radiation. If you could somehow induce the exact same currents and charge distributions in a slab of metal as an incident beam of light, it would generate a beam of light identical to a reflected beam."

So the whole "bouncing off" metaphor is wrong. Light doesn't literally bounce off atoms. It excites them to generate their own photons, which in turn sends out a new wave of light into space we see as the image of the surface transmitting it. Matter actually glows with its own photon-stimulated light!

I just saw an example of this on Paranormal Caught On Camera. The video clearly showed a lump underneath a women's bedspread moving around! She interprets it as the spirit of her recently deceased dog. (see below) But I think it's something more general than that. I found a video (see below) of another one where a guy films his blanket moving around from underneath. A commenter suggested a rat but he said he smashes it and even remakes the whole bed and it still happens. I too experience this same phenomenon. I once had an old mattress with holes in it and experienced what felt like something small moving around underneath. I could actually feel it moving from underneath on my hands. I thought a mouse at first. But then I bought a brand new mattress and it still happens. There are absolutely no mice in my apt. This is a real paranormal phenomenon akin to the shaking bed phenomenon. There is simply no other explanation for it.

Paranormal Caught On Camera segment of woman and her moving blanket:

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=739232935144382

Another one:

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1011784237962851

And here's another one they actually lift the blanket from and find nothing.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fXv4_UtAPFc