Herbal supplements are often ‘rice and weeds’
DNA tests show that many pills labeled as healing herbs are little more than powdered rice and weeds. […] Among their findings were bottles of echinacea supplements, used by millions of Americans to prevent and treat colds, that contained ground up bitter weed, Parthenium hysterophorus, an invasive plant found in India and Australia that has been linked to rashes, nausea and flatulence.
(tags: herbal-remedies scams quality medicine dna testing fillers allergies st-johns-wort echinacea)
Scryer: Netflix’s Predictive Auto Scaling Engine
Scryer is a new system that allows us to provision the right number of AWS instances needed to handle the traffic of our customers. But Scryer is different from Amazon Auto Scaling (AAS), which reacts to real-time metrics and adjusts instance counts accordingly. Rather, Scryer predicts what the needs will be prior to the time of need and provisions the instances based on those predictions.
(tags: scaling infrastructure aws ec2 netflix scryer auto-scaling aas metrics prediction spikes)
Your Assignment for Today: Chew Gum
We have known about [the dental health benefits of xylitol in chewing gum] for a surprisingly long time. In the 1980s, a high-quality, randomized trial in Finland found that children who chewed xylitol-sweetened gum had as much as 60 percent fewer cavities compared with children who didn’t. A 1989-93 randomized study of children around age 10 in Belize showed an even greater benefit; chewing xylitol-sweetened gum decreased the risk of cavities by up to 70 percent, and a follow-up study showed that the benefit lasted for up to five years.
(tags: xylitol via:eoin health dentist teeth chewing-gum snacks medicine)
Mike Hearn – Google+ – The packet capture shown in these new NSA slides shows…
The packet capture shown in these new NSA slides shows internal database replication traffic for the anti-hacking system I worked on for over two years. Specifically, it shows a database recording a user login.
This kind of confirms my theory that the majority of interesting traffic for the NSA/GCHQ MUSCULAR sniffing system would have been inter-DC replication. Was, since it sounds like that stuff’s all changing now to use end-to-end crypto…(tags: google crypto security muscular nsa gchq mike-hearn replication sniffing spying surveillance)