Yes the pricing is not for locals. Its for tourists that fly in. Lots of people fly in for Disney in Orlando and Miami for beaches or cruises. Now a tourist can hit both cities without flying again or renting a car.
There are a lot more costs to a car besides gas and tolls that add to the cost of that trip. But even besides that, you get to take 3.5 hours of your life back doing things that you can't do while you're driving.
“It’s on the lower end of what we would expect,” said Jamey Szalay, a plasma physicist at Princeton University who led the study. But “it’s not totally prohibitive” for habitability, he added. … “We don’t really know how much oxygen you need to make life,” she said. “So the fact that it’s lower than some earlier, wishful-thinking estimates is not such a problem.”
The actor is engaging young audiences again with “Sound Detectives,” a comic mystery podcast that teaches the art of listening. [...] a new podcast for audiences of elementary-school age that is part whodunit, part science exploration and part comic adventure.
Link to podcast. It'll be ten episodes long. The first episode came out Wednesday, with a new one each week until early next year.
“Sound Detectives” visits places like Yellowstone National Park, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the streets of Bangalore (now Bengaluru), India. When creating the missing-sound mystery for each half-hour episode, Smith and Sokolowski said in a video interview that they sometimes started with a site they found intriguing, and at other times with a sound. The sounds they chose can be challenging to identify; one example was recorded on Mars.
I must be a placebo effect case lol. I use phenylephrine HCl and it seems to keep me clear usually. If I forget it I spend the entire day sniffling or completely clogged. Though it only works if I’m well hydrated, it will actually make it worse if not.
Does anyone know if phenylephrine is otherwise harmless? If it's essentially harmless, and assuming all these various products have other ingredients that remain effective, then it seems to me that the easiest thing for the companies to do is to move phenylephrine from the "active ingredients" section to the "inactive ingredients" section.
It is harmless. But moving it to the inactive ingredients will still leave many of them without a decongestant and they’ll have to change all of their packaging/marketing. The other ingredients are usually for fever reduction or cough suppression. It would be a waste of their money to keep a useless ingredient.
Oh no, phenylephrine definitely has effects. It's just that decongestion isn't one of them. Intravenous phenylephrine is sometimes used in critical care hospital settings to deliberately raise a person's blood pressure:
Sudaphedrine definitely works, although it’s the only thing that has worked for me, and it’s under lock and key behind the pharmacy. I’ve never had results from OTC medicine like this, so I’m not surprised to hear it doesn’t work at all.
An advisory panel to the Food and Drug Administration agreed unanimously on Tuesday that a common decongestant ingredient used in many over-the-counter cold medicines is ineffective.
The panel’s vote tees up a likely decision by the agency on whether to essentially ban the ingredient, phenylephrine, which would result in pulling products containing it from store shelves.
If the F.D.A. ordered their removal, a trade group warned that numerous popular products — including Tylenol, Mucinex and Benadryl cold and flu remedies — might become unavailable as companies race to reformulate them.
On Monday and Tuesday, the panel reviewed several existing studies and largely agreed that the research settled the question that the ingredient was useless and no better than a placebo.
Several advisers noted that patients taking the drug were merely delaying their journey to a useful remedy.
“I think we clearly have better options in the over-the-counter space to help our patients, and the studies do not support that this is an effective drug,” said Maria Coyle, the chairwoman of the panel and an associate professor of pharmacy at Ohio State University.
Why It Matters: These Are Popular Staples of the Medicine Cabinet.
Every cold and flu season, millions of Americans reach for these products, some over decades. The decongestant is in at least 250 products that were worth nearly $1.8 billion in sales last year, according to an agency presentation. Among the products: Sudafed Sinus Congestion, Tylenol Cold & Flu Severe, NyQuil Severe Cold & Flu, Theraflu Severe Cold Relief, Mucinex Sinus Max and others.
The ingredient has long been considered safe and effective under an old, outdated agency standard, and the F.D.A. still says that it is safe.
Many remedies that do include phenylephrine also contain other, more effective medicines as well.
And medications that are considered effective for sinus and nasal congestion do still include nasal sprays with phenylephrine, like Afrin, or oral pseudoephedrine, such as Sudafed, or nasal steroids, such as Flonase.
Many popular cold and flu products that don’t specifically target congestion do not include the ingredient.
And it is still widely considered effective when it is used in surgery and to dilate the eyes. It is destroyed in the gut, though, scientists have concluded.
If the agency decides the decongestant should be eliminated from products, it could significantly disrupt the market for the makers of cold medicines if they do not have enough time to replace it in popular items.
What’s more: It could possibly renew widespread use of an alternative, pseudoephedrine, which was placed behind store counters or in locked cabinets because it was often used in illicit meth labs.
Dr. Hendeles, now an emeritus professor, said in an interview on Tuesday that he had been evaluating the ingredient since 1993.
“The bottom line is quality research has told the true story about phenylephrine,” he said.
The F.D.A. has formally now concluded that phenylephrine, when taken orally, is “not effective as a nasal decongestant.”
For consumers, the potential benefits of ending use of the ingredient, the agency suggested, would include avoiding unnecessary costs or delays in care by “taking a drug that has no benefit.”
nytimes.com
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