always proved traumatic to societies, and one of the major responses has customarily been apocalyptic fear and the search for scapegoats or divine messages. This was true of the Black Death of 1348 as it was still true of AIDS in the late 20th century. For centuries in Christian society people have made direct connections between the outbreak of epidemic disease and Doomsday. Not only were epid...

In the mid 1970’s Mark Mahowald constructed a new infinite family of elements in the 2–component of the stable homotopy groups of spheres, ηj ∈ π 2j (S)(2) [M]. Using standard Adams spectral sequence terminology (which will be recalled in §3 below), ηj is detected by h1hj ∈ Ext2,∗ A (Z/2,Z/2). Thus he had found an infinite family of elements all having the same Adams filtration (in this case, 2...

The longstanding bureaucratic logjam preventing much needed foreign qualified doctors from supplementing local skills shortfalls has been shaken loose while much improved rural and 'scarce skills' allowances are set to flow from July this year. Lobbying of the National Department of Health (DOH) by the Rural Doctors Association of South Africa (RUDASA), plus a court action in May 2001 by the Fo...

Many distinguished fellows of the College of Physicians including Harvey suffered from gout in the past, as recorded in Munk's Roll (I878-I968). As an example may be cited Dr. William Stukeley (I687 -I765) who started practice in Boston, my native town. He had long been a sufferer from gout and overpowered by repeated attacks he turned his thoughts to the Church, was ordained in I729, and becam...

In his novel V., Thomas Pynchon paints a picture of the twentieth century dominated by physics, and of human behavior swept along by the inescapable tide of physical laws [1]. What chance does an individual have in seeking order in his or her own world when the universe as a whole is streaming inevitably towards a state of maximum entropy? It is a distressing picture, made more chilling by Pync...

T he " red " versus " blue " state divide, most graphically captured in mapped results of the infamous United States presidential election battle between George Bush and Al Gore in 2000, has come to symbolize the political polarization of America. It may be surprising, therefore, to fi nd a Republican from President Bush's decidedly red state of Texas and Gore's running mate, a Democrat from th...

etween the orbits of Mars and Jupiter lie the remains of the early, violent history of the Solar System. These are asteroids, rocky bodies that range in diameter from a few hundred metres to just under 1,000 km. Over the past century, astronomers have realized that asteroids (and comets, their icy cousins originating further out in the Solar System) are the building blocks of planets. On page 7...

At a time when Portugal is struggling with budget deficits, public debt, unemployment, slow growth, and austerity – all issues causing a great deal of anxiety at home and much concern throughout the European Union (EU) and beyond – it might seem somewhat secondary to zero in on key features of the country’s demographic and health profile. But the reality is that these features are shaping, and ...

A major question confronting sustainability research today is to what extent our planet, with a finite environmental resource base, can accommodate the faster than exponentially growing human population. Although these concerns are generally attributed to Malthus (1766–1834), early attempts to estimate the maximum sustainable population (ergo, the carrying capacity K) were reported by van Leeuw...

Address for correspondence: Jonathan B. Tucker, Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project, Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey Institute of International Studies, 425 Van Buren Street, Monterey, CA 93940, USA; fax: 831-647-6534; e-mail: [email protected]. Since the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway in March 1995, killing 12...