Get your fill: Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop has resurfaced as the co-founder and chair of a new Austin company that hosts "Dr. Koop's Community" a website that dispenses health advice and -- believe it or not -- prescriptions, online. The site, which is free-of-charge but requires you become a member (albeit an anonymous one), provides a wire of current health-related news items, a health management section where visitors can plan to quit smoking or get ongoing advice on diseases like cancer and diabetes, and a "virtual pharmacy" which houses a drug reference manual, a section on drug interactions, and an area where you can actually refill (or transfer) existing prescriptions. "Koop's Community" also hosts chats with other medical professionals, and reviews other medicine-related websites. The opportunity to submit health questions to the top doc himself makes us feel better already.

Cold drunks: At least one state legislator and a spokesperson for Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) are complaining about some new-to-Texas vending machines that dispense alcoholic beverages. Right now, the machines have only been installed in private golf courses in the Dallas area, but could soon make their way to hotels across the state. Adult Vending Machines, Inc. says the machines are equipped with software that can be programmed to limit the number of drinks bought by an individual as well as the hours of machine operation, and maintains that since the patron is required to enter an ID number before a sale is made, the machines are able to monitor sales better than a bartender might. MADD is concerned about unauthorized sales to minors and customers who have had too much to drink already. Current Texas Alcohol and Beverage Commission (TABC) regulations prohibit the sale of any alcoholic beverage from a coin-operated machine, but the TABC has ruled these dispensers legal, on the basis of their technology. The vending machines are already in use in Oklahoma, Florida, California, and Colorado.

Confucius say, that's old! The fossilized bones of the world's second oldest bird, the Confuciusornis sanctus, or "holy Confucius bird," discovered in Beijing, China in 1995, have been delivered to UT Austin to be x-rayed by a geological scanner that will enable research of the bird's internal structure. The special scanner produces digital slices of an object, in this case the 120 million-year-old bird bones, and then the computer stacks one slice atop another to create a 3-D image that can be animated for further study. To see some fossils and to learn more about the process, visit the scanner lab's website (they plan to put up the x-rays of their Chinese guest) or visit the Confucius bird when it makes its public appearance in November at the Texas Memorial Museum on campus.

(8/1/98)