Walgreens and CVS have pulled the very popular heartburn medicine Zantac, along with their generic versions, from store shelves after the FDA warned they had found a cancer-causing drug among its ingredients.

The drug in question is nitrosodimethylamine, also known as NDMA (not to be confused with MDMA or MDNA). It's often used in laboratory research to induce tumors in mice.

From CNN:

The nitrosamine impurity known as N-nitrosodimethylamine, or NDMA, has been classified as a probable human carcinogen based on lab tests, and this isn't the first time that it has been detected in a common medication.

Since last year, the FDA has been investigating NDMA and other impurities in blood pressure and heart failure medicines known as angiotensin receptor blockers or ARBs. Numerous recalls have been launched as the FDA found "unacceptable levels" of nitrosamines in several of those common drugs containing valsartan.

A study published last year in the medical journal BMJ found no "markedly increased short term overall risk of cancer" among users of the valsartan drugs contaminated with NDMA. Yet that study also noted that research into long-term cancer risk is needed.

Customers can return their Zantac purchases to either store for a refund.

As a person living in Massachusetts who vapes for pain relief and has taken Zantac for years, I'm 0-2 this month. Thank God Advil is still okay. Oh, wait...

Drugstores are pulling Zantac-like heartburn drugs off the shelves over potential cancer risk (Washington Post) (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) Read the rest

Sure, CVS receipts are farcically long, but they're not infinitely long: they could be, though, as Garrett Armstrong's CVS Receipt generator demonstrates, using nothing more than HTML, CSS and Javascript (Armstrong: "I even made a crappy web-scraper to get real product names from their site"). (via Kottke) Read the rest

As we know, the absurdly long CVS receipts are due to the rise of data mining and target marketing. A fellow from Lakewood, Ohio recently Tweeted his ingenious upcycling of one of those ridiculous receipts. From News 5 Cleveland:

Andrew said he got the idea quite on accident – he bought a few items (less than 10, he said) from the Rocky River CVS, then laid the receipt out on his bedroom floor to take a picture of it to send to his friends.

He came back later and actually thought the receipt was one of the blinds that had fallen on the floor. “…they’re cheap blinds so they fall off pretty often,” he said in a chat with News 5.

“…and when I realized it was actually the receipt, I thought it would be funny to see if it fit in the window, and it happened to fit perfectly,” he said.

Buy a single item at CVS and you can end up with a 4'-6'-long ribbon of register tape, a kind of orgy of coupons and come-ons. Read the rest

CVS isn't just in the business of operating retail pharmacies: equally important is its prescription administration services, where it buys drugs from independent pharmacies, marks them up, and sells them to government-run programs like Medicare and prisons, using "spread pricing" to determine the markup that it applies to generic drugs. Read the rest

Researchers at UTokyo's Ishikawa Oku Lab have created an unbeatable Rock-Paper-Scissors robot that uses a computer vision system to analyze opponents' hand-shapes for precursors to their final move and form a winning response in a split second, so quickly that to the human eye, it appears that the robot has responded simultaneously:

It only takes a single millisecond for the robot to recognize what shape your hand is in, and just a few more for it to make the shape that beats you, but it all happens so fast that it's more or less impossible to tell that the robot is waiting until you commit yourself before it makes its move, allowing it to win 100% of the time. You might be thinking that you could fool the system by changing your mind halfway through, but my guess is that the hand and vision system are faster than your reflexes could ever be, and that it would be trivial for the robot to adapt to any creative moves that happens on the human end.

Robot Hand Beats You at Rock, Paper, Scissors 100% Of The Time

(via /.) Read the rest