European pharmacy system better than US
on
Robot Pharmacists
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· Score: 2, Informative
I lived in Europe for a few years (about 10 years ago) and prescription drugs were primarily obtained in packaged bubble packs (20, 30, etc. pills), much like you get many OTC drugs in the US. The advantage, I believe, is better quality control at the delivery end: not having to rely on an overworked pharmacist to dump and count the correct pills. Without a PDR (Physicians Desk Reference) you just can't verify that the pills you get are the ones that should have been prescribed. The US way just seems very backward and labor intensive.
Plus when you get a factory sealed box of pills, you get the package insert and all the information about the drug compound and side effects etc. In the US you always have to ask for that - it should be mandatory!
Interesting fact: In Switzerland, pharmacists are licensed to identify toxic and edible mushrooms and verify them for you. So after your deep woods mushroom collecting, you stop by the pharmacy with your bag of shrooms and get rid of the bad ones before dinner. Don't remember what they say about psychoactive fungi.
Without having a PhD, Jimmy Eng ( Eng bio 1, Eng bio 2) has done a helluva lot for the field of proteomics devoloping the groundbreaking software SEQUEST and related utilities.
Diesel engines for airplanes too
on
239 MPG Car
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· Score: 2, Informative
Diesels (GAP Diesel Engine) are cool for aviation: they will burn standard jet fuel (kerosene-like) which is cheaper than Aviation gasoline and unleaded (yes AVgas is still leaded!), and jet fuel is generally more available. And diesel engines will probabaly last longer than gas betw. overhauls.
Speaking as a pedigreed biochemist, you are correct in the extreme of vanishingly small samples. But these devices are still working with enough volume such that an analyte of interest at a substantial concentration (glucose, cholesterol, etc.) is effectively present at the same concentration at nearly all sample volumes.
Things DO fall apart (as you intuit) when the concentration of the analyte gets vanishingly small. We see this routinely when we try to quanitate DNA using PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) methods. PCR is sensitive enough that we can detect ONE copy of a DNA molecule in a volume of sample. So if you have say, one copy in 1ml of volume, and you sample.1 ml and do your PCR, your test would come up negative upon repeats (on average) 9 out of 10 times. With small numbers of copies you can use Poisson statistics to calculate your hit rate. With higher concentrations your Poisson distribution collapses to a gaussian that gets narrower and narrower, which is the regime that most normal wet analytical techniques work. For example, fasting blood glucose is about 100 mg/dl, which is about 5 mM. Assuming your device can work with 1 nanoliter sample size (this is about 100x smaller than a volume about the size of the proverbial period at the end of a sentence) you would have 3x10^12 molecules of glucose in it. Assuming your technique is sensitive enough to register the presence of this "small" number of molecules, you are still far away from seeing sampling errors on repeats of the same sample due to random fluctuations of the number of molecules (the "concentration") in any given sample.
Paul Yager at U. Washington (Seattle) has a good introduction to microfluidics:
Slashdot Mirror
I lived in Europe for a few years (about 10 years ago) and prescription drugs were primarily obtained in packaged bubble packs (20, 30, etc. pills), much like you get many OTC drugs in the US. The advantage, I believe, is better quality control at the delivery end: not having to rely on an overworked pharmacist to dump and count the correct pills. Without a PDR (Physicians Desk Reference) you just can't verify that the pills you get are the ones that should have been prescribed. The US way just seems very backward and labor intensive.
Plus when you get a factory sealed box of pills, you get the package insert and all the information about the drug compound and side effects etc. In the US you always have to ask for that - it should be mandatory!
Interesting fact: In Switzerland, pharmacists are licensed to identify toxic and edible mushrooms and verify them for you. So after your deep woods mushroom collecting, you stop by the pharmacy with your bag of shrooms and get rid of the bad ones before dinner. Don't remember what they say about psychoactive fungi.
Without having a PhD, Jimmy Eng ( Eng bio 1, Eng bio 2) has done a helluva lot for the field of proteomics devoloping the groundbreaking software SEQUEST and related utilities.
-- "Eat Bowl Futty"
Speaking as a pedigreed biochemist, you are correct in the extreme of vanishingly small samples. But these devices are still working with enough volume such that an analyte of interest at a substantial concentration (glucose, cholesterol, etc.) is effectively present at the same concentration at nearly all sample volumes.
.1 ml and do your PCR, your test would come up negative upon repeats (on average) 9 out of 10 times. With small numbers of copies you can use Poisson statistics to calculate your hit rate. With higher concentrations your Poisson distribution collapses to a gaussian that gets narrower and narrower, which is the regime that most normal wet analytical techniques work. For example, fasting blood glucose is about 100 mg/dl, which is about 5 mM. Assuming your device can work with 1 nanoliter sample size (this is about 100x smaller than a volume about the size of the proverbial period at the end of a sentence) you would have 3x10^12 molecules of glucose in it. Assuming your technique is sensitive enough to register the presence of this "small" number of molecules, you are still far away from seeing sampling errors on repeats of the same sample due to random fluctuations of the number of molecules (the "concentration") in any given sample.
Things DO fall apart (as you intuit) when the concentration of the analyte gets vanishingly small. We see this routinely when we try to quanitate DNA using PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) methods. PCR is sensitive enough that we can detect ONE copy of a DNA molecule in a volume of sample. So if you have say, one copy in 1ml of volume, and you sample
Paul Yager at U. Washington (Seattle) has a good introduction to microfluidics:
Microfluidics Tutorial and Prognostication
The real beginning of the internet:
FIRST CARASSO POST
"MT" for Multi-threaded. Without a doubt the best I've used on any platform. Due for migration to OS X very soon. Multi-threaded NewsWatcher B.
Sept 17 is date of the Camp David Accord signing