Professor Geoffrey Chamberlain, FRCOG, is chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynaecology at St George's Hospital Medical School, London. Enzyme linked immunosorbant assays (ELISAs) are the bases of many of the commercial kits currently available in chemist shops. The assay depends on the double reaction of standard phase antibody with enzyme labelled antibody, which is sensitive and s...

The article, " Are Children Like Werewolves? Full Moon and Its Association with Sleep and Activity Behaviors in an International Sample of Children " by Chaput et al. (1) was quite fascinating and thought-provoking. However, there is a potential flaw in their research – and perhaps in all the medical literature on this subject. Curiously, the study found a small but measurable difference in sle...

How effective, efficient and natural human-robot interaction can be depends for an important part on how meaning can be shared and construed between a human and a robot. The paper presents an initial investigation in the architectural functions that appear to underly embodied, situated understanding in joint action and interaction. The identified functions are combined into a concept system arc...

We present another explanation for the moon illusion, in which the moon looks larger near the horizon than near the zenith. In our model, the sky is considered a spatially contiguous and geometrically smooth surface. When an object (like the moon) breaks the contiguity of the surface, humans perceive an occlusion of the surface rather than an object appearing through a hole. Binocular vision d...

It is well established that the lunar cycle can affect the behaviour of nocturnal animals, but its potential to have a similar influence on diurnal species has received less research attention. Here, we demonstrate that the dawn song of a cooperative songbird, the white-browed sparrow weaver (Plocepasser mahali), varies with moon phase. When the moon was above the horizon at dawn, males began s...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to investigate an ancient hypothesis; the moon effect might increase incidence of injuries and hence admission of patients with trauma to Emergency Rooms (ERs) on full moon days. METHODS During thirteen months, 58000 trauma patients admitted in three hospitals that had the highest load of trauma patients in Tehran were studied. Due to lack of complete d...