Do your labels talk?

Hy-Vee’s do. Sort of. The pharmacy chain is rolling out ‘talking prescription labels’ free to visually-impaired patients, via a partnership with En-Vision America.

It’s actually an RFID chip (like what libraries use to check books in and out) in the cap that identifies the meds to either a small desktop ‘reader’ or a smartphone app, which then reads it aloud. Right now it reads prescription information, but there’s no reason it couldn’t include advertisements as well. “Are you still taking Zorbagen for your arthritis? Why not ask for Blurbamax instead?”

Lab-grown brain plays Pong

If you thought there were philosophical and ethical questions when scientists grew brain cells in a dish, it just got a lot more complicated.

A group of Australian and British researchers have taken human stem cells, coaxed them into becoming brain cells, and taught them to play Pong. The video game.

Of course, the article points out that “Pong is a first-generation video game,” so it’s not as if the clump (which — no joke — the scientists dubbed a “cyborg”) is learning to level a dragonknight in Elder Scrolls Online*. But still. (For you younger folks, the article explains how Pong is played.)

Other fun facts:

• They named it “DishBrain”.
• It learned to play “significantly faster than artificial intelligence machines”.

No, it doesn’t have its own Twitch stream yet. On the other hand…

* Or even a lowly sorcerer

Anthrax and pain

Giving someone anthrax will, to be accurate, stop their pain. But Harvard scientists and colleagues have found that a particular toxin from the anthrax bacterium can treat pain without killing the patient.

In fact, that anthrax toxin can also be used to carry other drugs to the pain-sensing neurons. Even better, while the pain-blocking was potent, the side effects were nil.

Additionally, the researchers observed that as the pain diminished, the treated nerve cells remained physiologically intact—a finding that indicates the pain-blocking effects were not due to injury of the nerve cells but rather stemmed from the altered signaling inside them.

Obviously experiments are ongoing, but at the moment, they think they’ve got a good foundation: “[U]sing a bacterial toxin to deliver substances into neurons and modulate their function represents a new way to target pain-mediating neurons.”

Hairspray recall

Proctor & Gamble is recalling several aerosol dry conditioner and dry shampoo spray products because it detected benzene in some of them. Brands include Aussie, Hair Food, Herbal Essences, Old Spice, Pantene, and Waterl<ss. See the details and product codes on the FDA recall page.

(And you thought those were all different brands. Ha!)

IBD treatment: taking one edge off the sword

Current treatment for inflammatory bowel disease involves blocking an inflammatory molecule (TNF-alpha) from binding to two receptors, TNFR1 and TNFR2.

What’s interesting, UC Riverside biomed researchers found, is that blocking both those receptors may not be a good idea. TNF-alpha, it seems, both promotes inflammation (when it interacts with TNFR1) and suppresses it (when it interacts with TNFR2) — “a double-edged sword.”

“If you block both the receptors, you block the destructive effects and the recovery. To circumvent this, in our work we opted to do selective targeting of TNFR1.”

Narrowing the target is already showing results (good ones, even). And as TNFR1 plays a part in diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and psoriasis, this is a breakthrough that could have some wind-ranging results.

Rite Aid closing 63 stores

The goal, of course is “to reduce costs [and] drive improved profitability.” It’s been losing money lately, but at least the losses have been slowing.

Prebiotics make for better eating

Women who took a particular prebiotic — galacto-oligosaccharides (GOS) — ate less sugar. In fact, they ate healthier in general, according to British researchers.

The research team found that participants who used the GOS supplements consumed 4.1% less sugar and 4.3% fewer calories from carbohydrates overall than women from the placebo group. Interestingly, the study also found that those who took the GOS supplements consumed around 4.2% more energy from fats.

Their working hypothesis: The gut bacteria reduce the patients’ stress, and thus they reduce their stress eating. So it’s all about the brain. But, as always, “more work needs to be done to confirm and help us understand the mechanisms.”

Captain Obvious cries into his eggnog

“Could holiday stress be affecting your child’s holiday joy?“

Bonus: “[m]others are twice as likely to be stressed by preparations.”