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One of my favorite hypotheses as to Why Do We Need To Sleep -- which, let us be clear, is one of the greatest mysteries of biological sciences -- is that it's some form of what computer scientists call "garbage collection".

Recent evidence suggests that sleep is for what urban planners call "garbage collection": Scientists have just reported the ( Read more... )

How did I not know about this? In 1974, Lewish Thomas published a collection of his essays which he had written in the NEJM as Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, which apparently was a big deal at the time. I'd never heard of it ( Read more... )

(via Marginal Revolution)

The BBC reports: A campaign by one of Brazil's biggest football clubs to encourage fans to become organ donors has led to a massive rise in the number of life-changing transplants and reduced waiting lists for organs in the area almost to zero ( Read more... )

Somebody on my flist posted two links recently.

The first was "The Creeping Danger of Conspiracy Theorists", a blog post by Kurt Eichenwald, which starts off "The results are in: we’re a nation of idiots" and says: That doesn’t mean that these uninformed folk are harmless. Fifty-four percent of Americans-more than half the country!-either ( Read more... )

Here's a topic I don't know a lot about. I'd heard about prescription discount cards, and then I just got one, unsolicited, through the mail. So I've been researching, and thought I'd share what I learned so far ( Read more... )

(h/t nancylebov -- I subscribe to the TAM podcast, but apparently something didn't work right and I never got this one, so my thanks for bringing it to my attention.)

This American Life just did an hour-long story about the danger of acetaminophen aka Tylenol aka paracetamol. The thing in it which shocked me the most is that... apparently most people don't ( Read more... )

There are more posts up at Bad Rx:

Wockhardt forbidden to sell in US by FDA. FDA declines to say why.

Where did Ranbaxys meds go in the US? A list of states. Also D.C.

Things that are Ranbaxy Did you know that Ohm Laboratories, Inc, is part of Ranbaxy? Neither did I. Includes three more NDC Labeler codes.

How likely is someone to get ( Read more... )

I've thrown together a WordPress blog with its own version of the information here. That way, people can pass on links to the What To Do About It information without my personal journal becoming the resource.

Please point your posts and tweets and whatnot at BadRx.wordpress.comOver there, I break out articles by corporate entity, instead of ( Read more... )

In re [sci, cur ev, pshrinkery, med] Fraudulent Generic Medication

How To Discover the Manufacturer of a Medication in Hand (in the USA). A guide to figuring out who made your pills, if they had to be made to US FDA specifications: So there you are, staring at a bottle of generic pills, trying to figure out who actually made them. What to do ( Read more... )