Originally an avid blogger, now more of a gentle gossiper... for more personal stuff see @clairethegarden
Camberley, Surrey, England
Joined May 2012
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Camberley Observed retweeted
BREASTMILK
She thought she was studying milk.
What she uncovered was a conversation.
In 2008, evolutionary anthropologist Katie Hinde was working in a primate research lab in California, analyzing breast milk from rhesus macaque mothers. She had hundreds of samples and thousands of data points. Everything looked ordinary—until one pattern refused to go away.
Mothers raising sons produced milk richer in fat and protein.
Mothers raising daughters produced a larger volume with different nutrient balances.
It was consistent. Repeatable. And deeply uncomfortable for the scientific consensus.
Colleagues suggested error. Noise. Statistical coincidence.
But Katie trusted the data.
And the data pointed to a radical idea.
Milk is not just nutrition.
It is information.
For decades, biology treated breast milk as simple fuel. Calories in. Growth out. But if milk were only calories, why would it change depending on the sex of the baby?
Katie kept digging.
Across more than 250 mothers and over 700 sampling events, the story grew more complex. Younger, first-time mothers produced milk with fewer calories but significantly higher levels of cortisol—the stress hormone.
The babies who drank it grew faster.
They were also more alert, more cautious, more anxious.
Milk wasn’t just building bodies.
It was shaping behavior.
Then came the discovery that changed everything.
When a baby nurses, microscopic amounts of saliva flow back into the breast. That saliva carries biological signals about the infant’s immune system. If the baby is getting sick, the mother’s body detects it.
Within hours, the milk changes.
White blood cells surge.
Macrophages multiply.
Targeted antibodies appear.
When the baby recovers, the milk returns to baseline.
This was not coincidence.
It was call and response.
A biological dialogue refined over millions of years. Invisible—until someone thought to listen.
As Katie reviewed existing research, she noticed something unsettling. There were twice as many scientific studies on erectile dysfunction as on breast milk composition.
The first food every human consumes.
The substance that shaped our species.
Largely ignored.
So she did something bold.
She launched a blog with a deliberately provocative name: Mammals Suck Milk.
It exploded. Over a million readers in its first year. Parents. Doctors. Scientists. People asking questions research had skipped.
The discoveries kept coming.
Milk changes by time of day.
Foremilk differs from hindmilk.
Human milk contains over 200 oligosaccharides babies can’t digest—because they exist to feed beneficial gut bacteria.
Every mother’s milk is biologically unique.
In 2017, Katie brought this work to a TED stage. In 2020, it reached a global audience through Netflix’s Babies. Today, at Arizona State University’s Comparative Lactation Lab, she continues reshaping how medicine understands infant development, neonatal care, formula design, and public health.
The implications are staggering.
Milk has been evolving for more than 200 million years—longer than dinosaurs walked the Earth. What we once dismissed as simple nourishment is one of the most sophisticated communication systems biology has ever produced.
Katie Hinde didn’t just study milk.
She revealed that nourishment is intelligence.
A living, responsive system shaping who we become before we ever speak.
All because one scientist refused to accept that half the story was “measurement error.”
Sometimes the biggest revolutions begin by listening to what everyone else ignores.
Camberley Observed retweeted
The Woman of the Day is the Anglo-Saxon noblewoman Godgifu of West Mercia, the only woman to remain a landholder in Britain after those robbing Normans swept in and stole everything that wasn’t nailed down (and quite a few things that were).
Of course you’ve heard of her. You’ve heard of the Godiva Procession which was instituted in 1678 by Coventry Fair to commemorate the legendary ride by the Lady.
Taking pity on the people of Coventry suffering grievously under her husband's oppressive taxation, she called his bluff that he would repeal the taxes if she would strip naked and ride through the streets of the town, clothed only in her long hair. She only agreed on the condition that everyone stayed indoors and shut their windows, but a tailor known ever afterwards as Peeping Tom disobeyed and was struck blind. Allegedly.
It was all bunkum. Absolute bunkum.
Lady Godiva’s real name was Godgifu. She married Leofric, Earl of Mercia, but both she and her husband were major philanthropists and among the most munificent of the Anglo-Saxon nobility until the Norman Conquest in 1066 (and those robbing Normans came along, etc).
In Anglo-Saxon times, in laws dated around 1008 AD, women enjoyed full property rights, from peasant to nobility. They could own land, farms, houses. Upon marriage, a husband was legally required to give his wife a Morgengifu (Morning Gift): land, money, or goods, which remained her independent property that she could sell, give away, or manage as she chose. Women wrote their own wills and left property to whomever they chose including children, servants, or religious institutions, and they didn’t need their husband's permission.
All that stopped after 1066. The new feudal system tied land ownership to military service, something women were barred from providing. Women became the chattels (property) of their husbands if they were married, or their fathers if they were not, a legal state known as coverture. Still, I’m sure the Normans thought they were being progressive and inclusive, two words I’ve come to loathe. But I digress.
Godgifu survived the death of her husband and was mentioned in the Domesday Book, one of the few Anglo-Saxons and the only woman to remain a major landholder after the Conquest.
Godgifu certainly would have ridden a horse but not in protest and certainly not minus her clothes. Still, the idea of it proved quite a crowd pleaser at Coventry Fair in 1678, even though the first fake Lady Godiva was actually a lad. Yes, I know. Some things just don’t change.
In the intervening years, the myth was spiced up by the Puritans to prove a moral point but dampened down by other Protestants to make it fit for delicate ears. Never forget: the objectification of women is eternal, along with its fraternal twin, misogyny. The two generally go hand in hand.
Despite several attempts to shut down the procession — in 1845, the Mayor got fed up with the crowds jostling to get a better view of her, expostulating, “It’s a disgrace”, and in 1854, the Bishop of Worcester protested against “a Birmingham whore being paraded through the streets as Lady Godiva” — it continued as a annual event until the 1960s.
Godgifu’s date of birth is unknown but she died in her mid-fifties in 1067 after the Norman Conquest of 1066. The Domesday Book of 1086 notes that the lands formerly held by her had passed to others. Men of course. Chattels are property, and property cannot own property.
Married women finally achieved independent taxation in their own right in 1990. Prior to that, their husbands were responsible for paying tax on their income unless she obtained his signature and consent to claim her own single person's allowance and pay tax on her own earnings. Her unearned income — such as investment or savings interest — still legally belonged to him.
And of course, the "marital rape exemption" — the legal assumption that a wife could not withhold sexual consent from her husband under the marriage contract — was not formally abolished in English law until 1991.
935 years. It only took 935 years in this country to demolish the legal status and definition of Woman as Property, and despite the Supreme Court ruling, we still find ourselves having to dismantle the definition of Woman as a feeling — with political parties, Civil Service departments, with trade unions, charities, retailers, and with sporting bodies.
I know many of us are tired of fighting the same old battles but keep going, sisters.
“We woman suffragists have a great mission — the greatest mission the world has ever known. It is to free half the human race, and through that freedom to save the rest.”
Emmeline Pankhurst, 17 October 1912.
Camberley Observed retweeted
On the sixteenth of December 1960 a twelve-year-old boy was put on a table in a San Jose hospital, given electric shocks until he was unconscious, and had an ice pick hammered through the thin bone above each eye and swept from side to side through the front of his brain, because his stepmother had told the doctor he was defiant. The doctor's fee was two hundred dollars.
Howard Dully was a big, clumsy, daydreaming boy whose mother had died when he was five, and his father had married a woman called Lou who could not stand him. She took him to six psychiatrists. All six told her the problem was not the boy. The seventh was Walter Freeman, who had performed more lobotomies than any man alive, who drove between state hospitals in a van he called the lobotomobile doing them by the dozen in an afternoon, with no gloves and no surgical training, and who had once done twenty-five in a day. Freeman's notes on Howard, which Howard did not read for forty-four years, record the symptoms. He objects to going to bed. He turns the lights on when there is broad daylight. He does not react to love or to punishment. He has a savage streak. On that evidence, and Lou's signature, and two hundred dollars, Freeman wrote that the boy would benefit from a transorbital lobotomy and did it four days later.
Howard remembers the table. He remembers waking with two black eyes and a fever and no idea what had been done to him, because nobody told him, then or ever. His father never spoke of it. Lou put him into a state institution the following year, and the boy with the holes in his brain spent the next forty years in and out of asylums, juvenile halls, a jail, halfway houses and the street, drinking, drifting, never quite able to say why he was the way he was, with a photograph that existed somewhere of a doctor in a suit standing over a child with a steel spike in each eye socket.
At fifty-six, driving a school bus, he went to find out. He found his file in Freeman's archive at a university in Washington, in the doctor's own handwriting, and read for the first time what his stepmother had said and what the doctor had agreed to. He went to see his father, who was eighty, and asked him why he had let it happen, and his father said he had been bullied into it. Howard told the story on the radio in 2005 and five million people listened to a man weep over a piece of paper.
Walter Freeman was not a quack. He was a professor of neurology, the man who had brought the lobotomy to America, and the operation had won its inventor the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949. The journals published him. The hospitals booked him. The newspapers called it a miracle. He did it to three and a half thousand people, nineteen of them children, and he kept doing it until 1967, when a patient died on the table and the hospital took his privileges away, and he spent his last years driving the country in the van looking up his old patients to prove it had worked.
That is what settled science looked like from inside, to a twelve-year-old. A mother's complaint, an expert's confidence, a procedure with a prize behind it, two hundred dollars, and a lifetime nobody could give back.
The same institutions now tell you what your child should eat, in the same voice, with the same certainty, and the leaflet has a logo on it. Howard Dully is in his seventies and still cannot say what was taken. Nobody ever apologised.
Camberley Observed retweeted
A warning to any woman over fifty thinking of eating steak and butter instead of what the surgery gave her.
- The three o'clock hunger goes, and the biscuit tin loses its excuse
- The night sweats ease off and the spare duvet goes back in the cupboard
- You sleep through, and lose your 3am reading time
- The fog lifts, and you'll remember why you walked into the room
- The rage that arrives at 4pm stops arriving
- The waist comes back in, and the spite trousers fit
- The joints stop creaking on the stairs
- Your bones get what they're built from
- Blood sugar stops climbing after breakfast
- The bloating goes, and the hot water bottle retires
- Your doctor writes "lifestyle" in the box and asks no questions
- Your husband loses two stone by accident and takes the credit
- The soya milk goes off in the fridge
- You stop being told it's your age
- You stop apologising
Proceed with caution. The advice you were given was designed to keep a woman of 51 hungry, tired, foggy and a size bigger, and it has been working perfectly.
Camberley Observed retweeted
Stunning medieval tiles for #tilesonTuesday
Winchester Cathedral & the largest surviving English medieval tiled pavement (c1260-80)
Geometric designs flanked by lions, eagles & griffins. Red clay was stamped with the pattern, the indentations filled with white slip & then fired.
Camberley Observed retweeted
97 years ago today Airship R101 overflew London on her maiden flight and overflew Highbury Stadium. #R10197
Camberley Observed retweeted
Brilliantly done by @RobTemple101 - creator of @SoVeryBritish.
Manager meeting for food packaging. So true!
Camberley Observed retweeted
If the petition had been easy we would have 100,000 signatures and 100,000 people who did not really understand the issues because they hadn't had to dig deeply.
Because it was slow, we have an army of people who have had to deeply understand what the issues are.
Winning.
Camberley Observed retweeted
Restore Britain opposes the mandatory fortification of flour with synthetic folic acid.
Food should be left as natural as possible.
This petition is about to hit 100k, and that will allow me to speak in Parliament opposing it.
Please sign/share.
petition.parliament.uk/petit…
Camberley Observed retweeted
Hopefully, this will put us on the home straight now and we can focus efforts on educating the MPs ready for the debate.
Thank you @RupertLowe10
Restore Britain opposes the mandatory fortification of flour with synthetic folic acid.
Food should be left as natural as possible.
This petition is about to hit 100k, and that will allow me to speak in Parliament opposing it.
Please sign/share.
petition.parliament.uk/petit…
Camberley Observed retweeted
Please keep signing. When the Science Committee in 2017 reviewed it. They didn't look at scientific research of adverse effects of Folic acid prior to 2005 and only reviewed a few known existing health outcomes link with B12 def, existing cancer patients and cognitive decline.
This quoted post is unavailable.
Camberley Observed retweeted
Accents: Northumberland ⏳️
The old Northumberland accent and its wider Northumbrian dialect originate from the early medieval Anglian speech brought to northern Britain by Germanic settlers in the 5th and 6th centuries.
Northumberland's geographical position and its troublesome border history with Scotland kept its rural speech isolated, preserving conservative Germanic and Old English pronunciations that faded elsewhere.
Camberley Observed retweeted
Just came across in a folder where I have collected interesting things...
Camberley Observed retweeted
Gov says that there is not enough data to set a "safe upper limit" for folic acid exposure.
Same gov then puts it into our flour without a single safety trial!
Sign the petition.
Camberley Observed retweeted
I had an interesting conversation yesterday with a dean of education at an American university. She asked: what is the evolutionary explanation for why human beings are so willing to believe things that are at odds with their day-to-day experience? What evolutionary advantage to we gain from ignoring reality? You'd think it would be a disadvantage.
What makes this particularly puzzling is that the more educated and intelligent a person is, the more likely they are to exhibit this cognitive dissonance.
This is what Claude says:
The short answer most evolutionary psychologists would give is that her premise contains a hidden assumption: that the function of belief is to track reality. For much of what we believe, it isn't. Several explanations work together here.
**The cost of being wrong is usually tiny; the cost of being out of step is large.** Dan Kahan's work on "identity-protective cognition" makes this point well. If I'm wrong about climate sensitivity or the origins of a pandemic, the consequences for me personally are close to nil, since my belief changes nothing in the world. If I hold a view my social group regards as heretical, I may lose friends, status or my job. For ancestral humans, whose survival depended on their band, being expelled was close to a death sentence. Natural selection would favour minds that prioritise coalitional loyalty over accuracy wherever accuracy carries no immediate penalty. Philosophers such as Dan Williams call these "socially adaptive beliefs."
**Absurd beliefs can be useful precisely because they are absurd.** If a belief is obviously true, holding it says nothing about your loyalty, because everyone holds it. A belief that runs against common sense works as a costly signal: it shows you're willing to pay a price to belong. Richard Sosis has documented this pattern in religious communities, where more demanding creeds produce more cohesive and longer-lasting groups. Shibboleths work because outsiders find them hard to fake.
**Trusting others over your own experience is mostly a winning strategy.** Joseph Henrich argues that humans succeeded through cumulative culture: copying the practices of prestigious elders even when the reasons are opaque. His example is manioc (cassava) processing in South America. The traditional preparation is long and laborious, and skipping it causes no immediate harm, but it removes cyanide that would otherwise poison you slowly over years. Someone who trusted their own experience over tradition would have died. So we evolved to defer to testimony, and the occasional absorption of nonsense is the price of a system that is usually right. This cuts both ways. The same willingness to believe things that contradict experience is what lets us accept that the Earth orbits the Sun, or that invisible germs cause disease.
**Asymmetric errors favour false positives.** Under error management theory (Martie Haselton and colleagues), when one kind of mistake is much costlier than another, selection favours biases toward the cheaper error. Mistaking wind in the grass for a predator costs little. Making the opposite mistake might cost your life. We are therefore primed to see agency, patterns and intention where none exist, which is fertile ground for superstition and conspiracy theories.
**Self-deception helps persuasion.** Robert Trivers and Bill von Hippel argue that we deceive ourselves partly to deceive others more convincingly. A man who sincerely believes he is more able, more virtuous or more in the right than he is makes a better advocate for himself.
**People are less gullible than they appear.** Hugo Mercier, in *Not Born Yesterday*, distinguishes "intuitive" beliefs, which guide action, from "reflective" beliefs, which we profess but keep in a separate compartment. People who claimed to believe Pizzagate mostly left bad online reviews of the restaurant rather than calling the police. When a belief would actually cost us something in daily life, we tend to quietly stop acting on it. Many beliefs that seem to ignore reality are closer to declarations of allegiance than to working models of the world.
**There is also a mismatch problem.** Our deference to consensus evolved in groups of perhaps 150 people, where the shared view had usually been tested against local reality. Mass media and online communities can manufacture a consensus far removed from anyone's direct experience, and our instincts can't easily tell the difference.
So the answer to the dean's puzzle is roughly this: we don't ignore reality where it bites. We ignore it where it doesn't, and in those domains belief serves social ends rather than epistemic ones. The interesting question then becomes what happens when those cheap, tribal beliefs are aggregated into votes and public policy, where they start to have real consequences that no individual believer bears.
Camberley Observed retweeted
Are you over 50?
Do you care about someone who is?
Should they have to restrict their flour intake to 80g a day (less than one sandwich)?
No breakfast cereal, marmite, pizza, biscuits, cakes, bechamel?
It is unjust.
Sign the petition.
Camberley Observed retweeted
The Old Cornish Accent:
This video is a wonderful view into the old Cornish accent and spirit. This fascinating interview of 77 year old Cornish maid Emanda Billings in 1964 is a great insight into the everyday life of our recent ancestors. She was born in Victorian England (1800s), a world in which we've lost all connection.
The Cornish accent (also called Anglo-Cornish or Cornu-English) developed as local Celtic speakers shifted to English between 1300 and 1750, adopting regional West Country English while keeping a strong Brittonic language substrate. ⏳️
Camberley Observed retweeted
Folates are natural reduced molecules essential to life in every cell.
Folic acid is synthetic and interferes with normal folate function by:
a) occupying the enzyme DHFR so that folates cannot use it
b) directly inhibiting MTHFR which is needed for the folate methylation pathway to switch genes on and off
c) functionally blocking folate receptor alpha which is how folates reach brain cells.
It is a DRUG.
Not food.
Sign the petition:
petition.parliament.uk/petit…
nitter.cf/fauxlate/status/197377…
Camberley Observed retweeted
Oh my god, toxic chemicals.
Everyone,, please sign this petition. Folic acid has pyrimidine in it.
Alterations, oxidative stress, or abnormal metabolism of synthetic or damaged pyrimidine derivatives can lead to cytotoxicity, mutagenic effects, or renal impairment
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