Do we live in a ‘small universe’?

Adhesive small bowel obstruction: where do we stand now?

Adhesive small bowel obstruction (ASBO) is one of the most frequently encountered disorders in Emergency Surgery Departments worldwide without negligible hospital admission rates and social costs (1,2). Notwithstanding significant improvements in techniques and materials, intra-abdominal adhesions following abdominal surgery still represent a major unsolved and debated issue harbouring challeng...

Do We Live in a Vanilla Universe? Theoretical Perspectives on WMAP

I discuss the theoretical implications of the WMAP results, stressing WMAP’s detection of a correlation between the E-mode polarization and temperature anisotropies, which provides strong support for the overall inflationary paradigm. I point out that almost all inflationary models have a “vanilla limit,” where their parameters cannot be distinguished from a genuinely de Sitter inflationary pha...

How Long Do We Live?

Period life expectancy is calculated from age-specific death rates using life table methods that are among the oldest and most fundamental tools of demography. These methods are rarely questioned, much less criticized. Yet changing age patterns of adult mortality in contemporary countries with high life expectancy provide a basis for questioning the conventional use of age-specific death rates ...

Do We Know What We Do not Know? A Response to Celine Bonnet

Do We Expect Most AGN to Live in Disks?

Recent observations have indicated that a large fraction of the low to intermediate luminosity AGN population lives in disk-dominated hosts, while the more luminous quasars live in bulge-dominated hosts (that may or may not be major merger remnants), in conflict with some previous model predictions. We therefore build and compare a semi-empirical model for AGN fueling which accounts for both me...