Noma is an opportunistic infection promoted by extreme poverty. It evolves rapidly from a gingival inflammation to grotesque orofacial gangrene. It occurs worldwide, but is most common in sub-Saharan Africa. The peak incidence of acute noma is at ages 1-4 years, coinciding with the period of linear growth retardation in deprived children. Noma is a scourge in communities with poor environmental...

Communicative behavior, perhaps more than any of man's other activities, depends upon patterning for its significance and usefulness. An accidental inversion of words or letters or sounds can produce grotesque alterations of a sentence, and to scramble the elements at random is to turn a sensible message into gibberish. No attack upon the problems of verbal behavior will be satisfactory if it d...

South Africa going to second democratic elections saw two path-breaking works exploring disgraceful crimes and emotional commotions in an intriguing era. One is J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) and Andre Brink's The Rights of Desire (2000). The Protagonists of both the works are middle-aged caught in the noose of Eros and are seen resisting the change of tides and resigned to the fateful happenin...

An unusual microscopic abnormality has been identified in the lobectomy specimens removed surgically from the brains of 10 epileptic patients. The abnormality could seldom be identified by palpation or with the naked eye. Histologically, it consisted of congregations of large, bizarre neurones which were littered through all but the first cortical layer. In most, but not in all cases, grotesque...

Although the processing of facial identity is known to be sensitive to the orientation of the face, it is less clear whether orientation sensitivity extends to the processing of facial expressions. To address this issue, we used functional MRI (fMRI) to measure the neural response to the Thatcher illusion. This illusion involves a local inversion of the eyes and mouth in a smiling face-when the...

Children do not show the same recognition disadvantage for inverted faces as adults do. It has been suggested that this is because the configural encoding (which is disrupted by inversion) becomes more useful or available as we get older. The distinction between configural processing and featural processing, however, is not always clear--it may be a dichotomy or a continuum. The perceived norma...

Military personnel serving in war are confronted with ethical and moral challenges, most of which are navigated successfully because of effective rules of engagement, training, leadership, and the purposefulness and coherence that arise in cohesive units during and after various challenges. However, even in optimal operational contexts, some combat and operational experiences can inevitably tra...

Monsters are commonly stereotyped as horrible and grotesque creatures. But in Frankenstein The Island of Doctor Moreau, Shelly Wells both delineate some complicated but meaningful monster characters. These monsters’ features natures represent their creator’s intention purpose. In texts, monsters ugly benevolent, while creators eccentric monstrous. relationship between men allows us to view the ...