#Uni of Aberdeen

[uniofaberdeen]

Study reveals new insights into the origins of Scotland's mysterious Picts

Scotland's Picts have long been viewed as a mysterious people with their enigmatic symbols and inscriptions, accentuated by representations of them as wild barbarians with exotic origins.

But a newly published study by an international team led by researchers at the University of Aberdeen and Liverpool John Moores University is helping to shed new light on the origins of the Picts.

The Picts were first mentioned in the late 3rd century CE as resisting the Romans and went on to form a powerful kingdom that ruled over a large part of northern Britain, in present-day north-east Scotland.

In the medieval period, the Picts were considered immigrants from Thrace (north of the Aegean Sea), Scythia (eastern Europe), or isles north of Britain but as they left few written sources of their own little is known of their origins or relations with other cultural groups living in Britain.

Archaeologists have conducted the first extensive analysis of Pictish genomes and their results have been published today (27/04/2023) in the open access journal PLOS Genetics.

The results reveal a long-standing genetic continuity in some regions of the British Isles, helping to build a picture of where the Picts came from and providing new understanding of how present-day genetic diversity formed. The findings also confirm descriptions by the great English historian Bede of the far-flung eastern origins of the Picts as one of myth and fantasy.

The researchers used Identity-By-Descent (IBD) methods to compare two high-quality Pictish genomes sequenced from individuals excavated from Pictish-era cemeteries at Lundin Links in Fife (Southern Pictland) and Balintore in Easter Ross (Northern Pictland) to those of previously published ancient genomes as well as the modern population.

Dr Linus Girdland Flink of the University of Aberdeen, senior corresponding author of the study, said: “Among the peoples present during the first millennium CE in Britain, the Picts are one of the most enigmatic.

“Their unique cultural features such as Pictish symbols and the scarcity of contemporary literary and archaeological sources resulted in many diverse hypotheses about their origin, lifestyle and culture, part of the so-called ‘Pictish problem’.

“We aimed to determine the genetic relationships between the Picts and neighbouring modern-day and ancient populations.

“Using DNA analysis, we have been able to fill a gap in an understudied area of Scotland’s past.

“Our results show that individuals from western Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Northumbria display a higher degree of Identity-By-Descent (IBD) sharing with the Pictish genomes, meaning they are genetically most similar among modern populations.”

This genetic make-up was distinct from areas of southern England where there is a greater relative degree of Anglo-Saxon heritage.

Dr Adeline Morez from Liverpool John Moores University, lead corresponding author of the study, adds: “Our findings also support the idea of regional continuity between the Late Iron Age and early medieval periods and indicates that the Picts were local to the British Isles in their origin, as their gene pool is drawn from the older Iron Age, and not from large-scale migration, from exotic locations far to the east.

“However, by comparing the samples between southern and northern Pictland we can also see that they were not one homogenous group and that there are some distinct differences, which point to patterns of migration and life-time mobility that require further study.”

The analysis of mitochondrial genomes from Lundin Links has also provided an insight into another Pictish myth – that they practised a form of matriliny, with succession and perhaps inheritance going to the sister’s son rather than directly through the male line.

“In a matrilocal system we would expect to find females staying in their birthplace after their marriage and throughout their life.

“At Lundin Links, diversity in the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA suggests this was not the case. This finding challenges the older hypotheses that Pictish succession was passed along the mother’s side and raise further questions about our understanding of Pictish society and its organisation.”

[philzokman]

SOBBING SO HARD RN im so bad at french but i need all a's to get into the uni course i want and i havent been studying french bc iwas like 'mhmhmhmm!!! 4 days is eniogh time to become fUKCING FLUENT IN A LANGUAGE' WHY AM I SO STUPUD MY EXAMS ON MIONDAY IM GOING TO EAT CONCRETE also why does the tangled soundtrack go so hard like actually im alternating between the duolingo french podcast, the tangled soundtrack, pulps discography and prayign HFJKDSHF

[driftwoodcalliope]

Nothing funnier to me than looking back at my teenage years, a self-appointed intellectual deciding that I thought sports were stupid and useless because ✨art✨ and ✨literature✨ were so much more fulfilling and cultured and now going on ten years later I follow football and rugby religiously as I study music in uni.

Funny how things work out.

[crit20art]

[ID: a traditional sketch of Jonathan Sims and Martin Blackwood from The Magnus Archives as they might appear as a woman and as a non-binary butch, respectively. Jon is a small, thin British-Pakistani woman with short curly hair. She wears a large cardigan with a cami and business casual capris. Martin is a tall, fat Vietnamese-Polish person with glasses, many freckles, and short hair with an undercut. They wear a tank top, leather jacket, and jeans with a carabiner clipped to their belt loop. Martin stands with one hand in their pocket and one hand on Jon’s shoulder, smiling fondly at her. Jon rests her hand on Martin’s at her shoulder and cuts her eyes back at them with a loving expression. End ID]

uhhh @tdogkarate said the words “butch lesbian Martin” and i blacked out and this happened. it’s v messy and i won’t vouch for the proportions but im sharing cause it made me happy and also filled me w So Much Gender

honestly this would change very little about them (including names i love them being girlies named Jon n Martin…) but here are some lil headcanons:

they/them lesbian Martin (yeah we’re openly projecting now what of it!!!!!)

Jon n Georgie started transitioning at the same time at uni and when Jon felt like she had to change her name, it was Georgie who assured her that it was ok to remain Jon

HRT did not affect The Voice much for Jon but she owns it and it’s sooooo sexy it’s fucking insane bonkers gorgeous. Martin has written no less than four poems about it (finding one of these in s2 may or may not have greatly softened Jon’s opinion of Martin)

Jon is hit a bit harder by concerns about her appearance after the coma, bc her head got shaved (goodbye beautiful gender-affirming hair) and she’s lost a lot of the weight that defined her figure. She gets angry at herself for even caring and it snowballs into her snapping at Martin at some point, but Martin, who’s Been There w body issues, reassures her as much as they can and takes her on a very nice trip down to Aberdeen to get some clothes other than Basira’s old athleisure wear. and after several hours of Jon being stared at starry-eyed by Martin and being told with soft awe “yeah you look incredible in that” like 500 times, she feels a lot better

anyway jonmartin rights in every universe forever i love them sm. also i love you women i love you butches i’m frankly feeling a bit insane abt it all right now

[recreationaldivorce]

[ID:

Map of Britain titled "37 TOTAL BRITISH UNI ENCAMPMENTS" and subtitled "WHERE ARE THEY NOW?". The graphic is marked "LONDON STUDENT ACTION FOR PALESTINE" with the LSAP logo in the bottom-left. An asterisked small print reads "*LOCATION PINS ARE NOT 100% ACCURATE. AS OF 12/8/24"

On the map, the location of each university where there was a pro-Palestine encampment is represented by a small tent symbol. The names of the universities are written on the map, with colour-coded backgrounds. The colours of the backgrounds of the uni names represent what happened with the encampment. By category, the universities are:

Ongoing: 2x

Bangor University

University of Cambridge

Ongoing after Eviction: 1x

SOAS

Decamped with Ongoing Negotiations: 15x

University of Aberdeen

Aston University

Cardiff University

University of Edinburgh

GS

ICL

University of Kent

University of Leicester

University of Manchester

Newcastle University

University of Portsmouth

University of Sussex

University of Swansea

University of Warwick

University of York

Decamped: 7x

Aberystwyth Uni

Durham University

University of Exeter

Falmouth University

University of Leeds

University of Lincoln

UAL

Decamped with Legal Threat + Police: 5x

University of Bristol

Lancaster University

University of Liverpool + Liverpool John Moores

University of Nottingham

University of Oxford

Evicted: 7x

University of Birmingham

KCL

LSE

QM

University of Reading

University of Sheffield

UCL

/End ID]

[duchessofostergotlands]

Buckle up for a long, rambling personal story. So many of you will know I’m hoping to move back to Scotland soon. And I’ve been thinking about who I still know in Scotland, who I might want to reach out to and catch up with, which led me down a rabbit hole of people I knew at school. There is one guy who is in the area I want to live in who is hot as fuck. Like unreal levels of hot. At school his friends looked like potatoes and he was like Henry Cavill. And he was always much quieter than his friends who were total twats, I don’t know why I was friends with them. Anyway he’s a successful architect now and even hotter, somehow. To the point I can’t understand how he would still be single but there’s no obvious partner on his social media. But I have only actually spoken to him once. At a party, 12 years ago. We were in a corner and he asked me how far away St Andrews (my uni at the time) is from Aberdeen and I was nervous - he was so beautiful - and don’t know anything about distances so I said I don’t know and the conversation just ended. I only remember it so clearly because it was also the night I lost my virginity to a friend of his in a not fantastic way (I told you this was rambling). I think we were briefly friends on Facebook after that conversation but we were never friend friends. So with that context… how creepy is it to be stalking him after 12 years? And how creepy would it be to hypothetically go for a stroll near his office some day in the hopes he pops up on a dating app? I will remind you he is movie star hot. Discuss.

[povlnfour]

AHH A BABY BOYYY!!!

it’s so cool that your partner is korean! your son is gonna be the most multicultural kid ever, especially if you raise him to speak or understand the languages you know (and i thought my mix was interesting haha)

speaking of, i remember you saying you were learning arabic! how’s that going?

- 🪐

I KNOW RIGHT AHHHH i cannot wait to meet him i hate that i have to wait so long😭

yes!! he’s still learning korean himself as he actually grew up in aberdeen in scotland (we met at uni in manchester haha!), but i think we really want to teach baby it eventually as i know it’s my partners dream to visit korea for some time and i’d love to take him there with our baby one day🥹 such a random logistic i never even considered about until i found out i was pregnant like … its a lot of languages between us what are we gonna choose

OH YES!! i’m still trying my best, it’s definitelyyy the hardest i’ve had to learn but it’s such a beautiful language. i’m starting to be able to form simple sentences. i need to get back on it tbh as id love to be able to communicate with my best friend in her language🥹🤍

[vyrmu]

Went to use my laptop and noticed no stylus... Have torn up the flat for it only to find that there is a find a pen function on the surface pro.... The location shows the general area of the Aberdeen uni library and it was last registered a month ago. (ADHD brain be damned) WAH. I hope they have a lost and found box and its just chilling there 😩 please....

[lovedthestars-toofondly]

OP you are so right on all counts

unfortunately this is also acutely topical to me because my uni is in the process of sacrificing its entire modern languages department on the altar of budgetary constraints

there is a petition protesting this here:

staff are at risk of losing their jobs. students are faced with the prospect of not being able to finish their degrees. the Gaelic programme, vital for keeping an already endangered language alive, is included in this

signing and sharing are hugely appreciated.

Please help us save our language programmes!

I love you people going into "useless" fields I love you classics majors I love you cultural studies majors I love you comparative literature majors I love you film studies majors I love you near eastern religions majors I love you Greek, Latin, and Hebrew majors I love you ethnic studies I love you people going into any and all small field that isn't considered lucrative in our rotting capitalist society please never stop keeping the sacred flame of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and understanding humanity and not merely for the sake of money alive

[aberdeenlsuk]

Looking for reliable commercial laundry services in Edinburgh? Aberdeen Laundry Services offers top-notch solutions tailored to meet the unique demands of businesses. Whether you manage a hotel, restaurant, healthcare facility, or any other commercial enterprise, our services ensure your linens, uniforms, and textiles are impeccably cleaned and ready for use.

[mitmama]

Vancouver Food

Vancouver Food | Whistler | Travel Tips

This is our second time skiing at Whistler with the kids. We love flying into Vancouver because of the yummy Asian food. We flew in at night and stayed in Richmond, just across the bridge from the Airport.

We are happy to finally go to Yue Restaurant for dimsum, having called to make a reservation this time around. Turned out it might not be necessary this time. Check out their heated teapot, unique shrimp rolls with shrimp on top, and perfect shrimp dumplings.

We checked out both fancy Asian Malls like Aberdeen Center with a fun Japanese home goods store...

... and more traditional Supermarket 2000 that felt to Mike and myself like the Asian grocery stores that we grew up with. There's even a store that only sells ginsengs.

There's even a boba row with boba tea shops right next to each other:

Our favorite restaurant in Vancouver, Kingyo, is a Japanese izakaya place with Kobe Beef you cook on a hot rock. They also have yummy sushi, and delicious Tan Tan noodle. And if they have the corn on the cob, be sure to get that!

On the way back from skiing, we ate at Guu Original, which my husband's gone to 15 years ago along with Kingyo. Amazing they kept up the quality of food for so many years. We loved the seafood salad, the perfect uni, and a unique stir-fried udon.

Our last meal we had at Richmond just before we got on the airplane was at Tin Tin Seafood Harbor, which opens at 9am. Besides excellent shrimp dumplings, we enjoyed.

They also have the perfect lava buns.

Next, on to Whistler for skiing.

Vancouver Food | Whistler | Travel Tips

[mllebleue]

What would I do to read that thesis. It's not accessible through my uni library's access to U of Aberdeen's library. Darn it.

Update on fanbinding dissertation: binding the dissertation itself!

After many days and nights of writing and wrangling footnotes and proofreading (where I couldn't convince my laptop that yes, I meant textualisation, not sexualisation), 'twas time to bind the beasts! In three copies, no less! Which I approached with way too much confidence from my one fanbind experience, and came with many fun little surprises due to the format guidelines I had to follow 🤡

This is going to be a long one, so here's my happy unfocused mug to confirm that it all ends well:

First pickle: The typesetting. I absolutely loved typesetting fanfic, but the dissertation had to be A4 (way less fun, boo-hoo), one-sided, with every page numbered. Did you know that LibreOffice won't let you add blank pages and only number the non-blank ones, without skipping numbers? In order to print signatures I could fold into one-sided pages, only numbered on the right-hand pages, I ended up switching to landscape orientation and including the equivalent of a blank page in the left margin.

Second pickle: The imposing, which I couldn't figure out using the amazing bookbinder with my weird landscape 2-page layout. I finally gave in and rearranged all the pages manually, which looked like p. 1 on the recto / p. 10 on the verso, then p2/p9, p3/p8, p4/p7, p5/p8, p6/p7. And because there was no way I was paying print-in-colour prices for all of this, I further split the manually imposed pages into two files, one for the greyscale printer (cheaper) and one for the colour printer (highway robbery). Still came up to ~£70, just for printing.

Very glad I went in chunks of 10 for the signatures, it made both the math and the folding using sheets from two different piles much easier, highly recommend (if for some absurd reason you also want to bind one-sided numbered pages in folded signatures).

Third pickle: Linear time. Had planned on having so much time to print and bind this thing, but kept writing and rewriting and proofing and oops! It was due in less than 24 hours and it was still not out of the laptop. So.

22/09/24, 6pm: Got to the library, started printing.

6.45pm: Found another printer where all the paper was the same shade of white, started printing again 🤦‍���️ (kept the the misprints to use as scrap paper when glueing)

7.30pm: Started folding the 150 sheets of paper (3 x 100-page dissertation, 2 pages per sheet). Went from the last episode of The Magnus Protocol, to an episode of Welcome to Night Vale, to deciding restart The Magnus Archive, which felt almost poetic.

9pm: Headed back home, trimmed the edges (with a borrowed guillotine), folded the endpapers, stabbed everything. Lack of pictures to be blamed on my inability to mess with linear time, and the eventual sleep deprivation.

10.30pm, I think? Started sewing the signatures together, again with Supernatural (which I started rewatching when I submitted my first dissertation assignment in mid-May, and finished 2 days after submitting the dissertation itself, again, such poetry).

2am, probably? Tipped the endpapers and glued cheesecloth over the spines. Somehow figured out where to set the three textblocks to dry (I don't have a press). Sadly gave up on sewing on (or glueing) headbands, because time.

3am-ish: Cut the missing cover pieces out of millboard (had already cut 4 of 6 covers, since I knew it had to be A4), measured the spines of the three textblocks and cut those as well.

???am: Did some math, because sure, that's the right time for that. Cut the bookcloth to size, glued the cover pieces on the bookcloth. Remarkably only messed up the measurements on one of them! That means one of the copies has a millimetre of millboard showing in the inside corners of the back cover, but not enough time/bookcloth/millboard to redo it, onward we go!

Way past dawn: Took a break for food while the covers somewhat dried. Cased the three textblocks in the three covers, with the endpapers bubbling, which took me by surprise since it was the same paper and same glue I had used for the fanbind without any problem. I'm now thinking that bigger book = more time needed to apply the glue = endpapers getting warped, but I was so exhausted by this point that who knows. Again, no time to redo it!

9.30am: Stacked the dissertations under the heavy reference books I used to write the dissertation. Toute est dans toute hein. Went to bed while they (mostly) dried.

2.30pm: Woken up by my neighbour's dj set. Eventually put all that hard work in a tote and walked to school to hand it in at 4.30pm.

Fourth and last pickle: The titling. Couldn't find paper long enough to do a half-dust jacket like I did last time. Had big cutout plans, ran out of time and couldn't finish testing those. Also had some thicker textured paper I thought of cutting and glueing to the cover as a title card, but it turned out too thin and was warping. Finally resigned myself to submitting it with a blank cover, but one of my teachers asked if I would mind adding the title on with metallic markers to make it easier to identify (one copy will eventually be on the shelf at the Institute), and I'm SO HAPPY with how it turned out. Metallic markers. Why didn't I think of that. (I did, however, think about dressing appropriately for the occasion.)

So, is it possible to print and bind 3 books in less than 24 hours? Yes! Am I glad I did it? Also yes, very satisfying, love being extra! Would I do it again? God no, I've been sleeping for two weeks and I still haven't recovered. Can't wait to start binding something else though, so I guess it wasn't that bad.

That's it! That's over! Aaaaaah! Now waiting for the grade and comments, and hopefully soon I'll be able to share the content as well.

I'll also try to post some more about the research/writing process itself, somewhere between the late nights reading international treaties on income tax and the early mornings spent figuring out how to apply for a phd next.

Thank you so much to everyone who followed along, this was way more fun than I ever could have hoped!

[mood-of-collapse]

We had a cracking day of bestiary inspired fun for Art Club with a visit to @peacockandtheworm to see the current work from their new bestiary by Delaine Le Bas with a brilliant talk from @enxhiladas_ followed by a fun workshop at @arkade_gallery the results of which can be found on Schoolhill, the Green and next to the Worm on Castlegate. Eagle eyes might spot a few extra beasts around town with kite popping up between Arkade and Aberdeen Uni in the coming weeks 🙈 It was lovely to share space with everyone and to enjoy so many generous conversations 💚🐍 https://www.instagram.com/p/CpHyKyhIvmT/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[news24fr]

De fortes chutes de neige pourraient entraîner des coupures de courant et des fermetures de routes dans certaines parties du Royaume-Uni, car le pays est frappé par un temps glacial qui a provoqué des perturbations à grande échelle.Le Met Office a émis mardi un certain nombre d'avertissements météorologiques jaunes et oranges pour la neige et la glace, l'Écosse devant être la plus touchée.Un avertissement orange pour de fortes chutes de neige est en place pour certaines parties de l'est de l'Écosse, y compris Inverness et Aberdeen, à partir de 15 heures mardi, les conducteurs d'avertissement du Met Office devant être bloqués.Avec jusqu'à 15 cm de neige attendus dans la région, il a déclaré que certaines communautés rurales pourraient être coupées, qu'il y aurait des annulations de trains et d'avions, que la couverture de téléphonie mobile pourrait être affectée et que des coupures de courant étaient probables.Des avertissements jaunes pour la neige et la glace sont en place pour le Pays de Galles, le Devon et les Cornouailles, les West Midlands, le nord-ouest, le sud-ouest de l'Écosse et l'Irlande du Nord mercredi.Mardi, le public a été invité à ne voyager que s'il était "absolument essentiel" dans certaines régions du pays. La police d'Avon et de Somerset a déclaré qu'elle conseillait au public de rester en dehors des routes après avoir reçu plus de 100 rapports d'incidents liés à la route en cinq heures.Cinquante-trois collisions routières ont été signalées à la police entre 18 heures et 23 heures lundi, la majorité en raison des conditions météorologiques glaciales.Mardi matin, un incident grave s'est déclaré après qu'un bus à impériale transportant 70 passagers s'est renversé sur l'A39 dans le Somerset, faisant des dizaines de blessés.Le surintendant Mark Runacres a déclaré: «Nous conseillons au public de ne voyager que là où c'est absolument essentiel en raison des conditions de conduite dangereuses. Si un déplacement est nécessaire, nous demandons au public de faire preuve d'une extrême prudence et de prévoir plus de temps pour voyager. »Le Met Office a déclaré que lundi soir était la plus froide de l'année au Royaume-Uni jusqu'à présent, avec un minimum de -9,8 ° C enregistré à Topcliffe, dans le North Yorkshire, et toute l'Angleterre devrait connaître un temps froid jusqu'à 9 heures du matin vendredi.Jason Kelly, le météorologue en chef du Met Office, a déclaré: « Des conditions froides, glaciales et parfois neigeuses sont prévues cette semaine, le Royaume-Uni connaissant davantage un régime nord-ouest, avec des températures bien inférieures à la moyenne pour la période de l'année. Des averses hivernales sont probables à certains moments de la semaine dans le nord de l'Angleterre.Inscrivez-vous pour Première éditionNewsletter quotidienne gratuiteArchie Bland et Nimo Omer vous guident à travers les meilleures histoires et ce qu'elles signifient, gratuitement tous les matins de la semaine