American Doctors of Destiny

Manifest Destiny and American Identity in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian

McCarthy scholarship has predominantly tended to stress the writer’s revisionism with regard to his rendering of the myth of the American West in Blood Meridian (1985). McCarthy’s novel has beenmainlyhailed as a critique of the violence of manifest destiny. This study aims to delineate aspects of McCarthy’s narrative which resist the predominant view of him as a revisionist. In this re...

Destiny of Insignificance

Stress and wellbeing of junior doctors in Australia: a comparison with American doctors and population norms

BACKGROUND Stress in doctors adversely affects decision-making, memory, information-recall and attention, thereby negatively impacting upon the provision of safe and high quality patient care. As such, stress in doctors has been subject to increasing scientific scrutiny and has amassed greater public awareness in recent years. The aims of this study are to describe stress levels and the psychol...

Why genes aren't destiny.

The remote, snow-swept expanses of northern Sweden are an unlikely place to begin a story about cutting-edge genetic science. The kingdom's northernmost county, Norrbotten, is nearly free of human life; an average of just six people live in each square mile. And yet this tiny population can reveal a lot about how genes work in our everyday lives. Norrbotten is so isolated that in the 19th centu...

Geometry and Destiny

SUMMARY The recognition that the cosmological constant may be non-zero forces us to re-evaluate standard notions about the connection between geometry and the fate of our Universe. An open Universe can recollapse, and a closed Universe can expand forever. As a corollary, we point out that there is no set of cosmological observations we can perform that will unambiguously allow us to determine w...