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The American Red Cross announced a national blood shortage and is calling on more people to donate blood and platelets to shore up its supply, which it said has “fallen to critically low levels.” The organization, which is headquartered in D.C. and collects and distributes around 40 percent of the country’s blood donations, said its blood supply has dropped nearly 25 percent since early August, a shortfall of about 30,000 blood and platelet donations. (Amenabar, 9/11)

There’s a panel of 20 nutrition experts that has outsized influence on the American diet — and the food industry has worked hard to get friendly researchers into the group, new documents obtained by STAT show. (Florko, 9/12)

As you grow older, your health issues can increase, and with each new challenge, it becomes more difficult to know what is “normal” and what is not. A new challenge may not feel normal when you’re experiencing it for the first time, but that doesn’t mean it’s abnormal for the life stage you’re at. (Lustbader, 9/11)

A good treatment option for indigestion may already be in your spice rack, according to a new study. The study, published Monday in the medical journal BMJ, compared how more than 150 people with dyspepsia, or indigestion, responded to either the drug omeprazole, turmeric — which contains the compound curcumin — or a combination of the two. (Holcombe, 9/11)

Nearly a third of U.S. adults — 32 percent — have a tattoo, and nearly a fourth (22 percent) have more than one, according to a report from the Pew Research Center. The findings are based on data collected in July from 8,480 adults, comprising a nationally representative sample. (Searing, 9/11)

Ferid Murad, a pharmacologist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1998 for discovering that nitric oxide, an air pollutant, plays a key role in relaxing blood vessels, a startling finding that led to treatment advances in heart disease, erectile dysfunction and breathing struggles in premature infants, died Sept. 4 at his home in Menlo Park, Calif. He was 86. Dr. Murad’s discovery dates to the 1970s, when he began studying nitroglycerin, the substance that Alfred Nobel, the namesake of the annual awards given in medicine and other disciplines, used to invent dynamite in 1867. (Rosenwald, 9/11)

Ian Wilmut, the cloning pioneer whose work was critical to the creation of Dolly the Sheep in 1996, has died at age 79.The University of Edinburgh in Scotland said Wilmut died Sunday after a long illness with Parkinson’s disease. Wilmut set off a global discussion about the ethics of cloning when he announced that his team at the university’s Roslin Institute for animal biosciences had cloned a lamb using the nucleus of a cell from an adult sheep. (9/11)