Consumerism: a general introduction

Consumerism: a threat to health?

Tara Latimer et al. recently stirred up the debate on health consumerism, so far seen as the promotion of patients’ autonomy, and aimed at improving patients’ choices about their own health. These authors explain that health consumerism was turned into an instrument that, although wearing the clothes of patient-centred care, ‘reflects a philosophy of libertarianism rather than a philosophy of p...

Black Holes: A General Introduction

Our understanding of space and time is probed to its depths by black holes. These objects, which appear as a natural consequence of general relativity, provide a powerful analytical tool able to examine macroscopic and microscopic properties of the universe. This introductory article presents in a pictorial way the basic concepts of black hole’s theory, as well as a description of the astronomi...

Introduction to a general crystallography.

The definition of an extended crystallographic group is given, based on an n-dimensional Euclidean space, carrier of a faithful integral representation of a permutation group of atomic positions. The Euclidean crystallography of normal crystals and the higher-dimensional one applied to incommensurately modulated crystals, intergrowth crystals and quasicrystals are special cases of a general cry...

1 General Introduction

Parts of this introduction (see footnotes) have previously been published in Trends in Neu‑ rosciences (Meredith et al., 2012). The introductions of chapter 3 and 6 are based on the following text.

1 1 General introduction