Could Amedeo Modigliani have painted a thyroid swelling?

Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920). Self-Portrait, 1919.

Modigliani was born in Livorno, Italy, where he grew up in a Jewish ghetto. He studied art in Florence, and in 1906 he moved to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso and other leading artists of his era. In Paris, he was influenced by fauvism, the avant-garde art movement promoting a strong, emotional, and nonrealistic use of color, and by his friend the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, known...

Could Morality Have

Airway management in thyroid swelling

Goitre is a common clinical entity with high prevalence in adult populations in endemic areas. One of the mechanical results of goitre is deviation and compression of the trachea. Difficulty with intubation may be caused by deviation and compression. Thyroid surgery is usually considered a risk factor for difficult intubation. However the incidence of difficult intubation in thyroid surgery had...

Could plants have cognitive abilities?

Vegetation is traditionally regarded as passive, doing nothing but what is essential to grow and survive. Evidence is accumulating, however, in support of formerly esoteric notions that plants can communicate, remember, even count--features that one would call cognitive if they were observed in animals. Michael Gross reports.

How Could Language Have Evolved?

The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language "phenotype." According to the "Strong Minimalist Thesis," the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary th...