Since the now-famous storm of September 1999, the name "Floyd" has taken on new associations for many people in eastern North Carolina: devastation and environmental catastrophe. On 12 November 1999, representatives from state and federal agencies and local universities met on the NIEHS campus in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, to discuss the environmental health implications of the flo...

In early 1919 my father, not yet demobilized, came on one of his regular, probably irregular, furloughs to Carisbrook Street to find both my mother and sister dead. The Spanish Influenza pandemic had struck Harpurhey. There was no doubt of the existence of a God: only the supreme being could contrive so brilliant an afterpiece to four years of unprecedented suffering and devastation. I apparent...

Syria’s ongoing three-year civil war has displaced 6.5 million Syrians, left hundreds of thousands wounded or killed by violence, and created a vacuum in basic infrastructures that will reverberate throughout the region for years to come. Beyond such devastation, the civil war has introduced epidemics of infections that have spread through vulnerable populations in Syria and neighboring countri...

During the Second World War in London, the bombing raids targeting civilians led to a greater public reliance on forensic pathologists. Hospitals used their skills to identify the victims of raids and determine their cause of death, though many bomb victims were never identified. The public reputation of forensic pathology was enhanced by Dr. Keith Simpson's 1942 identification of a body found ...

When the World Trade Centre was destroyed in New York on 11 September 2001, I felt devastation for all the victims of this atrocity. This included the terrorist themselves as well as the families of the dead and injured and of the perpetrators. When America used this atrocity as a reason to attack Iraq I was very disturbed by the transposition of lines of blame to a country that had no direct l...

Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks exploit the acute imbalance between client and server work loads to cause devastation to the service providers. We pro pose a distributed gateway architecture and a payment protocol that imposes dynamically changing prices on both network, server, and information resources in order to push some cost of initiating service requests — in terms of moneta...

From multiple perspectives, the current mental health concerns in the Gulf communities began significantly earl ier than the Deepwater Horizon oil spi l l , when Hurricane Katrina hit much of the area now affected by the oil blowout. The major impact of Hurricane Katrina on mental health reflected the enormity of the devastation, including destruction of the infrastructure resulting in a dramat...

The ability of plants to fulfill nutritional needs by parasitizing neighboring plants has originated several times in angiosperm evolution. Molecular tools are now being exploited to investigate the evolutionary origins of plant parasitism and to dissect the genetic mechanisms governing parasitic plant-host plant interactions. Investigating the nature of signal exchanges between parasitic plant...

In 1990, shotguns and M-16s were adopted into Enga warfare, setting off some 15 years of devastation as youths (~17 to 28) took charge of interclan warfare. In response, people called on elder leaders to adapt customary institutions to restore peace; subsequently, war deaths and the frequency of war declined radically. Data from precolonial warfare, 501 recent wars, and 129 customary court sess...

In the last decade, forest fires have become one of the worst natural disasters in Portugal, causing great forest devastation, leading to both economic and environmental losses and putting at risk populations and the livelihoods of the forest itself. In this paper we present Bayesian hierarchical models to analyze spatiotemporal fire data on the proportion of burned area in Portugal, by municip...