Thursday 24 September 2015

Are your drugs *really* expired?

Ever wondered if those acetaminophen you found in the drawer with a 1990 expiration date are any good? Or if they could kill you?

I came across this study
http://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/drug-expiration-dates-do-they-mean-anything
(which is one of many giving the same information - but of course, not *enough* information for you to really make any decision on specific drugs in your house).

They referenced a U S Army study, which you can find online (but it looks like you can’t get it without either being a military/government person, or perhaps paying for it).  This was important to the Army since it could potentially mean savings of multiple millions of dollars in costs (not having to replace their reserves so often).

Nevertheless, I found a separate study:
http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1377417
which gave some good information on some specific drugs. One thing is that Acetaminophen seems to have a long shelf life. They looked at some drugs that were at least 28 years(!) past their 'expiry' date and the 250mg Acetaminophen tablet still had 249.2mg of active ingredient!

Various caveats on temperature and humidity of course – and some good rules of thumb (if it smells bad, or is starting to ‘crust over’ or change colour then consider it to be going bad).

If you find any other good sites with more information please let me know.

Monday 14 September 2015

Asteroids and commerce

Like many people, I have been fascinated by the thought of asteroids whizzing around the sun (and occasionally close to, or into, Earth). When I was young I had a poster on my wall that included all the planets and two asteroids - Ceres (actually a dwarf planet) and Eros. Interestingly, although Ceres is the largest asteroid (at almost 1000 km in diameter) Eros is quite far down the list (and is only about 34 x 11 x 11 km).

Side note: there are some pretty good pictures of Eros (from the NEAR-Shoemaker mission) and some incredibly good pictures of Ceres (from the NASA Dawn mission). The Dawn mission also captured great pictures of Vesta, which is about 525km in diameter and the second most massive (and third largest) asteroid.

But the really 'valuable' asteroids could be quite different. (Unless there is something under the surface of, say, Ceres that has more value to us. Perhaps the bright spots on Ceres signal something there?)


But to get back on topic - I recently found a site that ranks asteroids by criteria such as 'most valuable', 'most cost effective' and 'most accessible', as well as giving information on their orbits and their next closest passes by Earth. Take a look at: http://www.asterank.com/. It seems like a pretty good informational site (outside of the rather speculative valuations).

Most of the 'most valuable' are not easily accessible, and many of the 'most accessible' are not valuable. The 'most cost effective' list ranks them by a combination of value and accessibility - ranking '1999 JU3' as the best bet. You can click on that row to see information about the asteroid and its orbit, etc. Or you can enter a name into the 'Lookup' field (hint: enter a few letters and then wait - it will then bring back a filtered list in the lookup field).

Some other interesting possibly mine-able asteroids:
1. One of the most massive metallic asteroid is probably ‘16 Psyche’ (could seriously damage the prices of Nickel, Cobalt and Iron)
2. Or ’21 Lutetia’ (would hit the same commodity prices)

I also saw that ‘2011 UW158’ is ranked as a very valuable asteroid for the Platinum in it. It just made a close pass by earth (http://www.space.com/30074-trillion-dollar-asteroid-2011-uw158-earth-flyby.html) but won't be back for almost 100 years. Also, if a 'trillion dollars worth' of platinum suddenly entered Earth's platinum market, I'm sure it would quickly be a tiny fraction of that!

(If looking up on the 'asterank' site, put ‘436724 (2011 UW158)’ in the lookup field)

Sunday 13 September 2015

#NoToTorontoOlympicBid number 3

OK - now I remember why I was against Toronto making an Olympic bid! It will cost me a lot of money and mean less for actually improving the city.

As promised in the last '#NoToTorontoOlympicBid' post, I read a couple more articles on the olympics and recommend you do too.

The first was an article from the Globe & Mail - 'Why Toronto Should Say No to the Olympics'. And it references this article by Richard Florida looking at the book by Andrew Zimbalist that shows why hosting mega-events is a bad deal for the city involved.

Perhaps we can just follow Boston's mayor's lead. And for a few hints on how to influence the result, see this article on How Boston Kicked Out the Olympics.