Alan's work was necessarily interdisciplinary because he saw no way of understanding anatomy, physiology or behaviour without understanding all of them. Hence his work on visual plasticity and development incorporated retinal and collicular anatomy, lesion studies and neuropsychological work with patients. This led him to take up the discovery of blindsight by Larry Weiskrantz, his graduate sup...

The last century saw dramatic challenges to the Laplacian predictability which had underpinned scientific research for around 300 years. Basic to this was Alan Turing’s 1936 discovery (along with Alonzo Church) of the existence of unsolvable problems. This paper focuses on incomputability as a powerful theme in Turing’s work and personal life, and examines its role in his evolving concept of ma...

Those of us old enough may remember being fascinated by George Gamow’s popular books on mathematics and science—with the most famous being One Two Three...Infinity. Gamow got us to imagine living on the surface of a two-dimensional balloon with only two-dimensional experience of the surface. And then he got us to understand how we might detect its three-dimensional curved character via purely t...

Theoretical ecology uses conceptual and mathematical models, computer simulations, and data analysis to study ecological systems. Alan Hastings, a Distinguished Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California, Davis, has contributed significantly to the development of this field over the past four decades. Much of his research uses mathematical models of population...

Alan Hall Alan Hall was known throughout the world as the founder of the Rho GTPase signaling field, which has had a huge impact on many areas of research, from animal and plant development to cancer progression. He sadly died suddenly of a heart attack while out jogging in New York City on May 3, 2015. He was 62 and seemed fit and well. He was very active in his research, as well as in his new...

The forensic potential of microorganisms is becoming increasingly apparent as a consequence of advances in molecular sciences and genomics. This review discusses instances in which microbes, and in particular bacteria, can impact upon forensic investigations. There is increasing evidence that humans have an extremely diverse ‘microbiome’ that may prove useful in determining ethnicity, country o...

I live just off of Bell Road outside of Newburgh, Indiana, a small town of 3,000 people. A mile down the street Bell Road intersects with Telephone Road not as a modern reminder of a technology belonging to bygone days, but as testimony that this technology, now more than a century and a quarter old, is still with us. In an age that prides itself on its digital devices and in which the computer...

Robin Nunn has argued that we should stop using the terms ‘placebo’ and ‘placebo effect’. I argue in support of Nunn’s position by considering the logic of why we perform placebo comparisons. Like all comparisons, placebo comparison is just a case of comparing one thing with another, but it is a mistake, I argue, to think of placebo comparison as a case where something is compared to ‘a placebo...

athrine Wold Knudsen, MD,* Torbjørn Omland, MD, PHD, MPH,† Paul Clopton, MSC,‡ rne Westheim, MD, PHD,* Alan H. B. Wu, PHD,§ Philippe Duc, MD, James McCord, MD,¶ ichard M. Nowak, MD, MBA,¶ Judd E. Hollander, MD,# Alan B. Storrow, MD,** illiam T. Abraham, MD, FACC,†† Peter A. McCullough, MD,‡‡ Alan Maisel, MD, FACC‡ slo, Norway; San Diego and San Francisco, California; Paris, France; Detroit and ...

Since its inaugural issue in the spring of 1977, each issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine has contained a puzzle from Martin Gardner, dressed up as a brief science ction tale. This book collects the rst thirty-six. Most of them are mathematical, covering a variety of topics | numbers, geometry, games of strategy, combinatorics, simple logic | but a few involve word play and trivia ...