Janice

I will not be silent about this.

This is the office White House account bragging that they’ve suppressed free-speech and that the government now controls the media. It’s a dictatorship. You should be worried.

Toru Miyazaki gave 11 cats with advanced kidney disease an experimental injection. 15 others didn’t get it. A year later, 9 of the 11 treated cats were alive. Only 3 of the 15 untreated cats survived. He just filed for approval, and the drug fixes a defect only cats have. Most cats die from one thing: their kidneys fail. By age 10, 4 in 10 cats already have chronic kidney disease, and by age 15, the rate doubles to 8 in 10. Once diagnosed, a cat has about 2 years left. The reason kidney disease hits cats so hard is a broken protein in their blood. All mammals carry a protein that helps the kidneys clean out waste. In humans and dogs, the protein floats freely and goes to work when the kidneys are in trouble. In cats, it stays stuck to another protein and can’t get loose. So the waste piles up, and the kidneys eventually give out. Miyazaki originally found the protein in 1999, back when he was at the University of Tokyo. He figured out the cat-specific glitch in 2015. The paper he published in the Veterinary Journal in February laid out the trial. The injection is a working version of the missing protein. His company, the Institute for AIM Medicine, filed the approval paperwork with Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture on April 24, 2026. If the review clears, the drug goes on sale in spring 2027. The 30-year lifespan figure in the tweet is Miyazaki’s own projection of what cats could reach without kidney disease. The trial only ran a year, and the average cat today lives 15. Most die from the same disease this injection treats. The research almost died in 2020. After running out of funding during COVID, Miyazaki went public. Cat owners across Japan responded by sending in 300 million yen, around 2 million dollars total. He resigned from the University of Tokyo and worked on the drug full time. The treatment in front of regulators today exists because cat lovers refused to let the research die.

Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers. When you plant wildflowers through a crop field, not just around the edge but in strips running through the middle, you get ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps living in the field instead of visiting it. They eat the aphids, the caterpillars, and the mites for free, all summer long. In controlled trials, fields with tailored flower strips had leaf-beetle numbers 40 to 50% lower and crop damage cut by around 60%, enough to drop below the threshold where spraying was even considered worth it. The flowers attract a standing army to our fields. We spent decades engineering chemicals to kill the insects eating the crop, when the insects that eat those insects would have worked for the price of seed.

📍 SF Bay Area Carol & Hubert are a 10-month-old brother and sister pair who would love to be adopted together. They're both so sweet and fun! Now that they're big kittens, nobody wants them. Can you share to help them find a family by their 1st birthday? 🩷

Q. How many fabricated assassination attempts does it take to change a lightbulb? A. Epstein files

Can someone please step up for this poor sweet boy? He didn't ask for any of this. Please share with your friends. 💔

📍 SF Bay Area This is a desperate plea for Bertie, a sweet ~13 y/o cat who has not had it easy. He is a very sweet boy but is not doing well in a kennel and needs out of here. He needs an adopter ASAP. He prefers to be the only pet in the home. more info in next tweet

Every use of a leaf blower is a massacre. The stream of air from a handheld leaf blower comes out between 180 and 200 miles per hour. That's enough to shred caterpillars, strip butterfly eggs off leaves, and fling overwintering bees, fireflies, ladybugs, and moths into the street. A chickadee needs 6,000 to 9,000 caterpillars to raise one brood. They overwinter in the leaf litter that falls ever autumn. The leaf litter your neighbor is blowing to the curb is next summer's songbird food. And on top of it, leaf blower emissions are their own category of bad. Running a two-stroke gas leaf blower for 30 minutes produces roughly the same hydrocarbon pollution as driving a car 1,100 miles. California and a growing list of cities have banned them outright. Germany's environment ministry told citizens not to use them unless "indispensable." Is it time for a total ban?

@ everyone talking about adopting Dweeb: think about how happy he would be to find out that his friends got homes too!! be his hero!!!

📍SF Bay Area We still have all these very adoptable kittens waiting for homes somehow: Goomba, Toadette, Carol & Hubert, and Soda Can They're getting close to 1 year old and are getting passed up for younger kittens. They're all extremely sweet 💔

If you have a bug zapper up, it's time to take it down. A University of Delaware study analyzed nearly 14,000 insects killed by bug zappers over a single summer. Mosquitoes accounted for 0.22% of them. Less than one quarter of one percent. The other 99.78%? Moths, beetles, midges, fireflies, and other beneficial insects doing exactly what your yard needs them to do. Here's why it's even worse than it sounds: mosquitoes don't find you by light. They find you by carbon dioxide, body heat, and skin chemistry. Your bug zapper is completely invisible to them. Meanwhile it's running all night massacring the pollination night shift. Moths are among the most important nocturnal pollinators alive, and they're flying straight into your zapper because they navigate by light. Bug zappers kill over 70 billion insects annually in the US. Harvard Medical School's Zika page specifically warns against them, noting they may actually increase mosquito populations by eliminating the beneficial insects that prey on mosquitoes. What actually works: eliminate standing water within 100 feet of where you spend time outside. That's your best bet. It's time to break up with the bug zapper.

Airlines took away Congress’s perks and suddenly they found money to fund TSA. Let’s take away their healthcare and watch what happens next.

@feederofcats You’ll make millions.

fundraising idea: I charge people $20 to come snuggle Dweeb for a while. Constant lap time for Dweeb, more money for Dweeb. I'm a genius

my productivity has taken a huge hit ever since this guy came into the picture. He wants to be snuggled 1000% of the time

Given that we all could probably use a bit of lighthearted humor right now, and since it’s been quite some time since my last “News from Romania” thread, here’s an all time best of collection of the funniest and most absurd real bits of news I’ve collected over the years. 🧵

WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE

This is one of the last times I’ll make my plea to the Germans. I’ll stop fighting and talking about it. But I work with AI technologies, this is my full time job including risk and responsible AI policies. Hessen, Bavaria, NRW, BW, you have betrayed your own people. Here’s why:

Breaking: Newly released documents reveal the US administration laid off the Delphic Oracle last year who had predicted that a mighty empire would fall if Persia was invaded.

"Scientists don't want you to know this" What? Have you ever met a scientist? This is like saying chefs don't want you to taste their food. They are desperate for you to be informed, they will often give you information for free, to walk you through your misunderstandings.