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.
Y’all stop calling people lazy because they unemployed. They probably applied to 200 jobs they were qualified for, got ghosted, received underpaid offers, and dealt with constant rejection. The system is broken, not their work ethic.
Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???
I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO CREATE AN ACCOUNT TO APPLY TO A JOB!!!! I've legit had to create a new workday account for nearly every job and it's bullshit!!!! You won't even interview me and I have to make a password???? Get real
Each bee has four wings. So this veil took about 5,000 dead bees to make. A single healthy hive holds up to 60,000.
Luci Jockel is a jeweler out of Rhode Island School of Design who only uses bees that died of natural causes. She found beekeepers who’d lost their hives and made a deal: she’d put in physical labor helping them rebuild, and they’d give her the wings from the bees that didn’t survive. A Rhode Island beekeeper named Paul Whewell had lost everything to a harsh winter. She worked his hives, learned to keep bees from him, then started her own colonies with her dad. Other wings came from rooftop hives at the RISD Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the MAD Museum in Manhattan.
Each wing is about half the width of a dime. She glued them one at a time with archival glue, the kind museums use to preserve artwork, to create a material she calls “bee wing lace.” The pattern comes from Dutch lace collars she studied in 1600s portraits at the RISD Museum. Nine years of work. The finished piece is a mourning veil, made to grieve the bees it came from.
Jockel started building this in 2017. Back then, US beekeepers were already losing around 40% of their colonies every year. Last year it hit 55.6%, the worst since tracking began in 2010. Commercial operations lost 62%. In raw numbers: 1.6 million colonies gone in twelve months, with damage above $600 million in replacement costs and lost honey production alone.
Bees keep most of your food supply running. About 75% of US crop production depends on them. California’s almond harvest alone needs 1.4 million hives trucked in every spring, roughly 60% of all managed colonies in the country, for a crop worth $6 billion a year. Total annual value to American farming: $34 billion.
She needed 5,000 bees and nine years to build one veil. One in every three bites of food you eat depends on the ones still alive.
Person whose daytimes have often sucked, and has only been consistently left alone at nighttime, conditioning them to equate nighttime with freedom: “Whyyyyyy do I keep staying up so late??”
It’s been one year since the pilot dropped!! I never dreamed that this project would go as far as it has. I’ve never really been that confident in my work which is why I’ve mostly done fanart up to the point. So I’m really grateful for the love and support~