This article is a philosopher's expanded review of two recent books on neurophysiology: Rodolfo Llinás's I of the Vortex and György Buszáki's Rhythms of the Brain. Researchers such as these are converging on a view of consciousness as originating in motility and as inherently temporal due to the brainwave oscillations that underlay it. Most current discussions of consciousness include implicit ...

“O morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug,” wrote Franz Kafka in The Metamorphosis. “He lay on his armorhard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely...

As a community, we (programmers, compiler writers, hardware architects, etc.) often take folklore, e.g. claims in programming guides, for granted. Inspired by Descartes’ methodic doubt, i.e. challenging the truth of one’s beliefs, we question this folklore. Thus, we have developed a tool suite to systematically test the memory ordering behaviour of multiand manycore chips and compared our obser...

Some critics of invasion biology have argued the ecosystems by nonindigenous species can create more valuable ecosystems. They consider invaded communities as because they potentially produce ecosystem services. To establish that introduction creates ecosystems, defend value is provisioned These services are derived from productivity, production and cycling resources. Ecosystem productivity a r...

Geriatric medicine has an encyclopaedic sweep, reflecting the complexity of both the ageing process and of our patient group. Keeping up with, and making sense of, the relevant scientific literature is challenging, especially as ageing has increased in prominence as a focus of research across many branches of the sciences and the humanities. This review of research published in 2012 in generali...

As the Royal College of Nursing Congress drew to a close in Harrogate members were in no doubt their national pay campaign had gathered momentum. It was no longer just about a 3 per cent pay rise for every nurse in the country, but about the future of the NHS itself.