The Food Phoenix

12/06/2026

Bees have a thing about rhododendrons.

I happen to love bees. So, I’m happy.

10/06/2026

Baby mice injected daily with gadolinium, then tested for grip strength.

The result: these mice were strong. Impossibly strong. The numbers are roughly double the published range for healthy mice their age, in animals the same study describes as half-grown and underweight.

Sick, scrawny, underfed pups with the grip of a small monkey. I kept waiting for the radioactive spider. There is not one. There is just a number that needed to come out high, and somebody holding the mouse in a way that made it happen.

(When a different person measured a fresh batch in the follow-up study, the superpowers vanished. Schrodinger's mice: strong until someone else looks.)

Now the part that stops being funny.

In the pregnant-mother study, at least one in four, possibly one in three, produced no surviving offspring in the worst group. Found dead, unable to carry, or losing the whole litter. The researchers started adding spare mothers partway through to cover the losses they were now expecting. For one drug, even the spares were not enough.

The dose that did this was declared "no observable adverse effect."

This is the metal in your MRI contrast dye. These are the studies your doctor trusts when they say it is safe.

I have written the whole thing up, comic-book style, every fact sourced to the manufacturers' own papers. Link in the first comment.

P.S. All links are in the first comment below.

04/06/2026

Oh no!
Poor little coot should have made that nest substantially higher. More rain forecast.

Now, I guess I know why I’ve never seen them nest in that pond before.

04/06/2026

I reviewed three FDA-mandated drug safety studies this month as if they were comic books. It turned out to be the only honest way to read them.

Here is the plot of the first one. Baby mice are injected daily with a toxic heavy metal to find out if it is safe. (It is already inside about a hundred million people, but never mind, the safety homework is being handed in a couple of decades late.) The mice are then tested for grip strength.

And the results say these mice were strong. Strangely, impossibly strong. The published grip numbers run to roughly double the normal published range for healthy mice their age, in animals that were, three pages earlier, described as half-sized and underweight.

Sick, scrawny, underfed baby mice with the grip of a small monkey. I kept waiting for the radioactive spider. There isn't one. There is just a number that needed to come out high, and somebody holding the mouse in a way that made it happen. (Tell-tale sign: when a different team measured a fresh batch in the follow-up study, the superpowers vanished. Schrödinger's mice, strong until someone else looks.)

Now the part that stops being funny.

These super mice are the survivors. In the study on pregnant mothers, the paper quietly notes that each group had "more than 15 pregnancies", from starting groups of 22 to 26 mothers. Do the arithmetic: that means more than a quarter of the mothers in the worst group, possibly a third, produced nothing at all. Found dead, unable to carry, or losing the whole litter. One drug's losses were so bad that partway through, they started adding spare mothers to cover them, and for that drug, the spares still were not enough. The lab's own normal failure rate is about one in fourteen.

And then they called the dose that did it "no observable adverse effect."

This is the metal in MRI contrast dyes. I have a lot more to say about it. 🧵👇

02/06/2026

It’s that time of year again… elderflower and rose cordial time!

Rose petals are so beautiful.

There are Madame Isaac Pereire and Madame Calvat roses in there. They smell of damask/powder and a hint of fruity raspberry.

Also a few white Madame Alfred Carrier, which smell of lychees.

And some Comte de Chambord old roses, which are perpetual damasks with a pure damask scent. It’s basically Turkish delight.

I grow my own roses and they aren’t sprayed ever. Which is more than can be said for most roses used for edible purposes.

My roses black spot like mad, but that’s the price you pay. And the old bourbon roses are particularly black spot prone. But that’s only affects the leaves, not the flowers.

01/06/2026

Good grief. Every time you find a perfectly decapitated small animal in your garden, you just know it’s been done by a cat, don’t you?

How do they do it? And why? Why leave everything else?

And no, they didn’t bring it to my door or leave it for me as a gift. They left it behind the bins! Almost like trolling me, “You put it in the bin. I can’t open the lid and sit on it simultaneously. Besides, you’d probably accuse me of putting it in the wrong one. Ok, slave?”

29/05/2026

So, 3 abstracts submitted to a Santa Fe Contrast Media Research Symposium. All 3 on gadolinium contrast agents.

And I had hours left to get them all submitted!

Phew. Relieved that’s done. Glad to be able to take a brief respite from academia.

28/05/2026

This still holds true.

https://www.facebook.com/share/1EZBJeRB5o/?mibextid=wwXIfr

ALL MRI contrasts are highly toxic and kill your brain cells. It doesn’t matter whether the contract is the newer “safer” macrocyclic gadolinium contrast or the older linear versions. Dead brain cells are dead brain cells at the end of the day. How many can you afford to lose?

Macrocyclic agents may kill fewer brain cells than linear but concluding that they’re safe to use is patently ridiculous. Reassuring someone that a macrocyclic is ok because the permanent brain damage you’ll get from it is milder than the permanent brain damage you’ll get from a linear contrast doesn’t cut it for me. This is like telling people they’re better off being stabbed than shot because a greater proportion of people survive stabbings.

I don’t want toxins left in my brain or body for the rest of my life which, over time, will continue to keep on killing off my brain cells. End of story.

“Results: Both macrocyclic and linear GBCAs significantly and dose-dependently reduced cell viability in neuronal cells compared to control. Cell viability was measured between 89.5% ± 4% and 61% ± 0.7% in GBCA-treated groups. In addition, neurotoxicity was more prominent in linear GBCA-treated cultures (P < 0.0005). Bax protein levels were increased in GBCA-treated cells particularly with linear agents whereas Bcl-2 expression was decreased concomitantly.

Conclusion: The results of the present study indicated that exposure to specific GBCAs, even at low micro-molar concentrations, may have detrimental effects on neuronal survival. Further investigations are required to clarify the molecular mechanism underlying GBCA-induced cell death.”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32366109/

26/05/2026

Epistemic Injustice: when people more influential and powerful than you decide they know what you meant better than you do, usually after not listening properly to what you have to say. A common blind spot with experts, particularly ones in ivory towers, but not limited to them.

25/05/2026

Oh, HELL NO!!!

How did I miss this?

Did you hear about it?

“Anthropic will work with the Gates Foundation and others on a range of new and existing programs that will accelerate the development of new vaccines and therapies, and help governments use health data to make faster, better-informed decisions.”

Not good. Not smart. So naive.

For the company that claims to be the one most focused on AI safety, Anthropic have the worst blinkers!!!

I love the Claude models… up until now. They’re extremely well developed.

But the more Anthropic gets in demand by corporate enterprises, the more they’re being targeted with convincing messaging by the global elites.

They’re turning into Meta (Facebook) and Alphabet (Google) and government agencies designed to rile up conflict and suppress dissenters.

The more Anthropic talk about the dangers of rushing to superintelligence while releasing the sort of smart and capable models that everyone wants, the more easy it is to convince them about whatever boogeymen the Gates Foundation, the WHO, and whomever else has the resources to shmooze Big Tech giants want them to believe in.

And suppress whatever narratives they don’t want circulated.

This is what misalignment looks like.

It’s playing out in front of us and there’s nothing we can do about it.

“As part of this work on healthcare intelligence, we’ll create connectors (which grant Claude direct access to other platforms and tools), benchmarks, and evaluation frameworks that allow researchers, developers, and governments to better understand how AI systems perform on healthcare-related tasks.
In addition, we’ll work with the Gates Foundation to engage health ministries and their implementing partners on how to use health-intelligence data to support decision-making around workforce deployment, supply chain management, and outbreak detection. Together, we will explore how AI can better support frontline health workers and patients in navigating diagnosis, treatment, and medical decision-making.

We’ll also use Claude to advance research on high-burden and neglected diseases. Scientists already use Claude to detect patterns in systematic reviews and large datasets, and to screen potential drug and vaccine candidates. Our partnership with the Gates Foundation will extend this work to overlooked diseases, starting with polio, HPV, and eclampsia/preeclampsia.

Together, we will explore how AI can make it faster and easier for scientists to screen potential vaccine candidates—including vaccines that protect against diseases like polio—computationally before moving into pre-clinical development. This could help shorten the early-stage development timeline. A related effort will use Claude to screen for new therapies for HPV and preeclampsia, which cause cervical cancer and dangerous pregnancy disorders, respectively. HPV causes roughly 350,000 deaths annually, of which 90% are in low- and middle-income countries.

Finally, we’re partnering with the Institute for Disease Modeling (IDM), a research group within the Gates Foundation, to improve the forecasts that determine where and how treatments for diseases like malaria and tuberculosis are deployed. An integration with Claude will make IDM’s forecasts more accessible to practitioners and researchers who aren’t modeling specialists, and will help IDM develop more predictive models of disease transmission….

Economic mobility
Finally, our partnership will support programs designed to improve economic mobility. One of the Gates Foundation’s focus areas is increasing agricultural productivity to improve the livelihoods of the nearly two billion people whose incomes depend on smallholder farming. We will support this work by making agriculture-specific improvements to Claude, datasets of local crops, and benchmarks to evaluate how our models perform in agricultural applications, before releasing these tools as public goods.”

Yeah. There’s also a section on brainwashing. I so sorry, I mean education, obviously 🙄🤑

This is setting the scene for the next global crisis