Free Republic

Drug Reimportation is Bad Policy Medicine In a clear example of the “cure being worse than the disease,” the House of Representatives recently passed legislation that gives the impression members believe that cheap prescription drugs are more important than safe drugs and that cheap drugs today are more important than new drugs tomorrow. Just before leaving for the August recess, the House approved by a vote of 243 to 186 the Pharmaceutical Market Access Act of 2003--a bill that allows consumers to import prescription drugs from 26 countries, including Canada and Europe. The lawmakers rejected a more sweeping proposal that...

The ultimate in miniaturization is the atom -- there are 10 million billion of them in a single grain of salt. The scientist Richard Feynman suggested several decades ago that it would be possible to use single atoms to store bits of data. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison have taken a large step toward making the idea a reality with a prototype that uses single silicon atoms to represent the 1s and 0s of computing. Practical atomic-scale memory would increase the amount of information that could be stored per square inch of recording material by several thousand...

SHANGHAI, July 6 (Xinhuanet) -- PC giant Dell said Friday its first research and development center outside the Untied States has been set up in Shanghai, the biggest industrial and business center in China. Ken Lanshe, general manager of the Dell (China) Product Research & Development Center, said Dell made the decision to open the center because it is confident in the Chinese economy and in the other parts of the Asian and Pacific region. He also cited abundant human resources, convenient transportation and logistic support systems as other major reasons Dell has selected Shanghai as the location for...