On April 14, 1913, Monday, the young surgeon of 36 years, Ernst Heller, assistant professor of Erwin Payr, Director of the Surgical Clinic of the University of Leipzig in Germany, while operating a patient with idiopathic achalasia of the esophagus, performed for the first time a cardiomyotomy extramucosal, leaving his enormous contribution to the history of esophageal surgery, in the 20th cent...

We envision a rational cacophony of “numberless infinities” of autonomous software agents engaged in dialogue and argument with each other, debating automatically every topic which humans now discuss and many we do not. This note presents the major elements we believe are necessary for the achievement of this vision, and outlines the progress already made — by ourselves and others — towards its...

That lumbar puncture is detrimental in multiple sclerosis has been taught for many years; the origin of this belief and the evidence on which it is based are difficult to trace. The general warnings sometimes given in text-book accounts of contraindications to lumbar puncture in this disease appear to depend chiefly on the familiar experience of an occasional instance in which clinical deterior...

AIM To investigate the effects of niacin on choroidal blood flow in age related macular degeneration (AMD). METHODS 12 AMD patients with bilateral drusen and visual acuity of 20/40 or better in the study eye received a single oral dose of niacin (six subjects received 500 mg and six received 250 mg) or matching placebo on two separate occasions. Laser Doppler flowmetry was used to assess rela...

Our ability to detect target sounds in complex acoustic backgrounds is often limited not by the ear's resolution, but by the brain's information-processing capacity. The neural mechanisms and loci of this "informational masking" are unknown. We combined magnetoencephalography with simultaneous behavioral measures in humans to investigate neural correlates of informational masking and auditory p...

The double-cued task switching procedure has recently been introduced as a new way to measure externally cued switch costs. In the present individual differences study, two hundred fifty young adults completed measures of task switching, inhibition, and long-term memory. A latent variable approach was taken to examine the relationships among these cognitive measures. Decomposing the externally ...