Health News

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has suspended at least two federal meat inspectors following the largest beef recall in the nation's history, a union head said Friday.

People who take a proactive role in their healthcare may be better-informed, but that may not necessarily translate into better health, results of a study hint.

As we recently posted, FeedBurner's integration into Google is moving along. We've got our coding hats on and are hard at work to get the essential product pieces where they need to be.

However, one somewhat-below-the-radar part of FeedBurner's integration that is already showing up as part of google.com is our new Help Center. (Well, "new" as of late 2007. We admit to being a touch slow on the draw with the PR on this one.) We point this out to show that migrating to a Googley-er tomorrow isn't strictly tied to FeedBurner charts 'n graphs 'n numbers. It used be difficult to find answers; a popup window here, a Forums post there, a blog post over yonder. The Help Center brings sorely needed structure (and searchability) to a bunch of resources that were largely scattered about before. You can now find topics like "What is a Subscriber? How does FeedBurner tally them?", and "Is there a feed file size limit?" in just one place. (We've still got nothing for you on "How can I avoid jury duty selection?") The Help Center will soon introduce new troubleshooting topics and contact options as well.

Speaking of the Forums: they are overdue for the Google treatment, too. We've provided them since shortly after FeedBurner launched as an essential, community-powered companion to the service itself. In the next few weeks, the Forums will move to a new Google Group, with the following benefits:

• Much less spam
• Improved [BUY CH3AP STUFF ONL1NE] search for old topics and conversations
• New email notification options when new topics are posted
• Much, much [FREE V!AGRA NOW] less spam

We also want to point out that FeedBurner Japan is also going to benefit from these Help Center and Groups changes, too. But what about the many other languages FeedBurner publishers use? Google strongly believes in making products accessible to the widest global audience; efforts to formally localize FeedBurner for the most popular and requested languages are under way, going well beyond the options we currently offer.

And, finally: Leap Year post!

The human brainstem, the most primitive area of our brains, has been notoriously difficult to image because of its small size.

U.S. inspectors found some mostly procedural problems at a Chinese factory that supplied the main ingredient for the recalled blood thinner heparin — but said they can't yet tell what is to blame for serious side effects.