How often can you give blood?

How often should you clean your room?

We introduce and study a combinatorial optimization problem motivated by the question in the title. In the simple case where you use all objects in your room equally often, we investigate asymptotics of the optimal time to clean up in terms of the number of objects in your room. In particular, we prove a logarithmic upper bound, solve an approximate version of this problem, and conjecture a pre...

How double eyelashes give you swollen legs.

Give what you can and keep what you need!

During cell division, peroxisomes are inherited to daughter cells but some are retained in the mother cells. Our knowledge on how peroxisome inheritance and retention is balanced and how this is regulated for each individual organelle remains incompletely understood. The new findings by Knoblach et al (2013) published in this issue of The EMBO Journal demonstrate that Inp1p functions as a bridg...

How You Can Contribute1

A research study on the effects of Rosen Method Bodywork was recently published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, by Riita Hoffren-Larsson, Barbro Gustafsson, and Torkel Falkenberg of the Karolinska Institute, Huddinge, Sweden. The following article is an interpretation and summary of their findings, accompanied by an interview with lead author, Hoffren-Larsson. I also d...

Compassion fatigue: how much can I give?

An increasing number of publications examine the disturbing effects on clinicians of witnessing or learning of trauma experienced by their patients. This vicarious traumatisation is described in various terms, including secondary victimisation, secondary survival, emotional contagion, counter-transference, burnout and compassion fatigue. It is generally accepted that, while they have significan...