Lately, there's been a lot of news about resveratrol, a chemical in red wines and grapes that appears to significantly reduce cancer and heart disease. Or at least it does in inebriated lab animals.

Beer, alas, can make no such claims. When it comes to resveratrol, suds are duds. But maybe not for much longer. A team of undergraduate students at Rice University has produced a beer that's rife with resveratrol; they created a genetically modified strain of yeast that ferments beer and makes resveratrol at the same time.

The students (most of whom aren't old enough to legally drink their concoction) will enter their brew in next month's International Genetically Engineered Machine. The event is synthetic biology's biggest competition, drawing dozens of teams from around the world who have used standard DNA building blocks to create living organisms that do odd things.

Let's hope the Rice beer does not come with a head.

GET ME THAT. STAT!

Far more than hotels, hospitals are all about clean sheets. The 900-bed Massachusetts General Hospital, for example, launders 27,200 pounds of material each day using 42-foot-long commercial tunnel washers, each of which can wash 5,200 pounds per hour. Eighty-two percent of the laundry is patient linen; the rest are scrubs and linen used during operations.

Many hospitals, however, don't do their own laundry. According to a Modern Healthcare survey, laundry is the number one hospital service that's outsourced.

NUMBER CRUNCHER

A single serving of Fritos Chili Cheese-flavored corn chips (1 ounce or 28 grams) contains 160 calories, 90 from fat. That's 15 percent of the recommended total fat intake for a 2,000-calorie daily diet.

It also contains 260 milligrams of sodium (11 percent); 15 grams of total carbohydrates (5 percent); 1 g of dietary fiber (4 percent); 1 g of sugar and 2 g of protein.

MEDTRONICA

Johns Hopkins Arthritis Center

hopkins-arthritis.com

A definitive, if somewhat daunting, site that provides well-written credible information on the multiple forms of arthritis as well as lupus, Lyme disease and fibromyalgia. Message board and ask-the-expert features are very helpful.

STORIES FOR THE WAITING ROOM

Apollonia is the patron saint of dentistry, martyred in A.D. 248 when her jaws were broken and her teeth knocked out before she was burned to death.

BEST MEDICINE

Each day, a patient at a mental hospital would put his ear to a wall and listen. His doctor watched him do this for many days until, finally, the doctor put his ear to the wall and listened.

After a few minutes, he turned to the patient and said, "I don't hear anything."

"Yeah, I know," replied the patient. "It's been like that for months."

PHOBIA OF THE WEEK

Athazagoraphobia — fear of being forgotten or ignored

OBSERVATION

I came. I saw. I concurred.

— Irvine H. Page (1901-1991), an American physiologist and pioneer in hypertension research

CURTAIN CALLS

French novelist HonorŽ de Balzac (1799-1850) died of caffeine poisoning, the likely consequence of his reported consumption of more than 50 cups of coffee per day.

To find out more about Scott Lafee and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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