Another metformin recall

Today ends in a Y, so there must be another metformin recall. And there is! This time it’s from Nostrum Laboratories in Missouri, recalling it for the same NDMA contamination as all the other recalls.

Drug delivery with microscopic robots

When you want to design a drug-delivery system for the gut, where do you turn? For Johns Hopkins researchers the answer was clearly “parasitic worms.” The worm’s trick of clamping onto a host’s intestine lets it get to the right spot before opening and delivering its payload.

Each is the size of a speck of dust, and thousands are released at once.

Sorry, no banana available for scale

Why that’s cool: The GI tract (as you may have noticed) tends to move, making it difficult for a drug-delivery system to stay in one spot long enough. But “these small drug carriers […] can autonomously latch onto the intestinal mucosa and keep the drug load inside the GI tract for a desired duration of time.”

Don’t obsess over happy endings

Look, everyone likes a happy ending. but that may not make us happy. Learn to focus on the entire experience, says a University of Cambridge neuroscientist.

Our brains measure the pleasure of an experience in two different ways. The amygdala considers the overall experience, while the anterior insula handles negative feelings — like disgust at an unhappy ending.

Imagine playing 10 hands of poker, losing badly in seven in the middle, but winning a bit back in the last two. The overall loss would get a thumbs-down from the amygdala, while the anterior insula would focus on those wins at the end — making the losing game feel better than it should.

In the gambling experiment, good decision makers […] showed a strong representation of the overall value in the amygdala, whereas suboptimal decision makers had stronger activity in the anterior insula. In other words, good decision makers need to be able to overrule a displeasing impression of an experience, such as an unhappy end.

Focusing on the end could make us make bad decisions — like choosing a restaurant with lousy food and amazing desserts.

Georgia insurance marketplace going away in two years

CMS has approved Georgia’s plan to change the way Peach Staters buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

Starting in 2023, instead of being able to go to Healthcare.gov to shop for a health insurance plan, Georgia consumers “will need to rely on private brokers, insurance companies, agents and commercial websites.”

The government-run Healthcare.gov will be replaced by private brokers who are paid based on which plans consumers choose; e.g., they earn about 22 percent more to steer people to low-coverage “short-term” plans, according to the state.

The plan faced opposition from both sides.

[T]here has been almost no public support for the plan, even among people within Georgia’s insurance and brokerage industries. Seventy-two of 75 organizations submitting formal comments opposed the change.

As one analyst pointed out, says “[B]rokers already exist. The waiver doesn’t enable new options; it just takes away healthcare.gov.”

“The payoff doesn’t strike me as being there,” said Joseph Antos, a health care expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C.

Quick Covid numbers

The U.S. had more than 90,000 new Covid-19 cases and more than 1,000 deaths on Tuesday alone.

Crazy science: Ants manage their own gut biomes — but it’s disgusting

Ants not only use the formic acid they generate as a weapon (it can disable prey or ward off predators) and to disinfect their nests — they apparently also use it to disinfect their food before eating it. The result is not only safer food, but a gut biome that’s both very acidic and home to select species of acid-loving bacteria.

The paper is “Formicine ants swallow their highly acidic poison for gut microbial selection and control” in eLife.