Five and a half decades ago, when Stith Thompson was the doyen of American folklore studies, he published his essay “The Challenge Folklore” in PMLA, leading journal Humanities (Thompson 1964) [...]

Although programming with them has lost the appeal and expectancy it enjoyed two decades ago, customary systems continue to play important roles, including in some of today’s most challenging predatory environments. This ongoing utility raises questions about how such could be better leveraged, why dilemmas, around human rights state-non-state relations, remain unresolved. Crafting solutions th...

The origins of adult-onset asthma are obscure. Five to six decades ago, some clinicians believed that asthma was primarily related to infection and that allergy, while important, played a secondary role (1,2). A decade ago, expert opinion held that asthma was a noninfectious allergic disease whose root cause was inflammation (3). Since then a growing body of evidence, reviewed in this book, has...

Several decades ago, surgeons tried to solve the problem of hypoparathyroidism with auto transplant of parathyroid tissue during surgery. The transplant of autologous parathyroid glands was first described, a more than a 100 of years ago in animal models by Halsted, with 60% of success when implant parathyroids of dogs in rectus abdominis [3]. In thyroid surgery was first described in 1926 by L...

Drosophila, Wnt, FGF, Jak/Stat, Rho, Rac, RhoGEF, Pebble, Naked Cuticle The site for the latest installment of the Fly Meeting (March 7–11) was downtown Philadelphia. The conference offered an illustration of all that is great about the Drosophila field bringing together evolutionary biologists, immunologists and everyone in between. Here I will provide a small sample of several advances from t...

We show that the oscillatory driving of crystal surfaces can induce pattern formation or smoothening. Depending on driving conditions, step bunching and meandering, mound formation, or surface smoothening may be seen in the presence of a kinetic asymmetry at the steps or kinks. We employ a step model to calculate the induced mass flux along misoriented surfaces, which accounts for surface dynam...

THE psychiatric manifestation called multiple personality has been extensively discussed. So too have the unicorn and the centaur. Who has not read of these legendary quadrupeds? Their pictures are, perhaps tiresomely, familiar to any schoolboy. Can one doubt that during medieval times many twilight encounters with the unicorn were convincingly reported? Surely in the days of Homer there were m...