If you walk into a pharmacy with prescription for Merck’s ZOCOR, which contains simvastatin, the pharmacist will probably give product containing simvastatin made by another company. The dispense “generic” product. State generic substitution laws, passed in 1970s to help government save money switching patients cheaper drugs, either permit or require this substitution. But drug brand names -- s...

A new study by Ito and colleagues on page 7 may help explain why patients with a severe lung disease called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) fail to respond to steroid treatment. Ito and colleagues show that steroids require the enzyme HDAC2 (histone deacetylase 2) to block the inflammatory transcription factor NF-κB. In patients with COPD, HDAC2 activity is reduced, rendering cells...

this paper presents a comprehensive robust distributed intelligent control for optimum self-healing activities in smart distribution systems considering the uncertainty in loads. the presented agent based framework obviates the requirements for a central control method and improves the reliability of the self-healing mechanism. agents possess three characteristics including local views, decentr...

In 1947, Paul Beeson showed that rabbits repeatedly injected with certain bacteria eventually become resistant to the bacteria's fever-provoking effects-a phenomenon known as endotoxin tolerance.

Because of risk aversion, any sensible investment valuation system should value less projects that contribute more to the aggregate risk, i.e., have a larger income elasticity net benefits. In theory, this is done by adjusting discount rates consumption betas. But in reality, for various reasons (Arrow-Lind and WACC fallacies, market failures), most public private institutions people use rate r...

this article is concerned with eugene fontinell’s idea about personal immortality. fontinell has offered a specific view about the possibility of afterlife, through employing the experimental method, william james’s pragmatic method, and also developing william james’s field theory and his psychological ideas about the “self”.  fontinell believes that it is possible to imagine immortality in a ...