Medical History is delighted to announce the winner of the 2014 William Bynum Prize: Clare Leeming-Latham’s wonderful essay titled ‘Unravelling the “tangled web”: Chemotherapy for Tuberculosis in Britain, 1940–70’. We are also pleased to announce a set of joint runners up: Elisa González (‘Nurturing the Citizens of the Future: Milk Stations and Child Nutrition in Puerto Rico, 1929–60’) and Anne...

Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Aarhus, Denmark University of Florence, Florence, Italy Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands University of Istanbul, Istanbul, Turkey University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, USA University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa (Received 2 July 2009; revised manuscript received 18 August ...

We address the issue of large-order expansions in strong-field QED. Our approach is based on the one-loop effective action encoded in the associated photon polarisation tensor. We concentrate on the simple case of crossed fields aiming at possible applications of high-power lasers to measure vacuum birefringence. A simple next-to-leading order derivative expansion reveals that the indices of re...

Directional cell migration requires proper cell polarization. The redistribution of the Golgi apparatus is an important event in the polarization and migration of many types of cells, as a polarized Golgi supplies membrane components for leading edge protrusion. Direct current electric fields induce directional cell migration in a wide variety of cells. Here we show that electric fields of 300 ...

We examine wave propagation and the formation of shocks in strongly magnetized plasmas by applying a variational technique and the method of characteristics to the coupled magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) and quantum-electrodynamic (QED) equations of motion. In sufficiently strong magnetic fields such as those found near neutron stars, not only is the plasma extremely relativistic but the effects of Q...

This paper deals with the Autler–Townes doublet structure. Applied driving and probing laser fields can have arbitrary intensities. An explanation is given of the broadening of doublet components with the growth of probing field intensity, which was observed in experiment. The effects of Doppler averaging are discussed.

We review the status of strong-field and attosecond processes in bulk transparent solids near the Keldysh tunneling limit. For high enough fields and low-frequency excitations, the optical and electronic properties of dielectrics can be transiently and reversibly modified within the applied pulse. In Ghimire et al (2011 Phys. Rev. Lett. 107 167407) non-parabolic band effects were seen in photon...

The Bennett hole is analysed for a medium of two-level particles with weak collisions beyond the scope of the perturbation theory. In the limit of small homogeneous width, the analytical expression for the hole shape is of the form of a Bessel function. The result is compared with data obtained by the variational approximation and numerical calculation. It is shown that the approximation gives ...

The two-photon two-neutrino interaction induced by magnetic field is investigated. In particular the processes γγ → νν̄ and γ → γνν̄ are studied in the presence of strong magnetic field. An effective Lagrangian and partial amplitudes of the processes are presented. Neutrino emissivities due to the reactions γγ → νν̄ and γ → γνν̄ are calculated taking into account of the photon dispersion and large ...

Theoretical studies of strong-field ionization of molecules are impeded by the complexity of the molecular electronic structure. Up till now, full ab initio calculations of the alignmentdependent ionization are available only for H2 and H2. For larger molecules, despite a tremendous amount of experiments, no ab initio calculations are available, and the most widely used approaches to explain st...