US AIDS initiative clears first hurdle

Minimum unit pricing for alcohol clears final legal hurdle in Scotland.

Scotland’s journey to a minimum unit price for alcohol has taken 10 years. It can be traced to a 2007 report by SHAAP, the coalition of Scottish Medical Royal Colleges and Faculties. The Scottish minority government made it a central aim in its 2009 alcohol strategy, but an attempt to pass legislation to implement a 50 pence (€0.56; $0.66) minimum unit price in 2010 failed. The multinational be...

First senior house officer job: goal or hurdle?

To many newly qualified doctors the prospect of applying for their first senior house officer job is daunting and comes at a time when they are concentrating on coping with their pre-registration house jobs. The huge numbers of applicants for each job must be equally daunting to their seniors, who may be faced with 100 or more applications for one or two jobs. We have conducted a survey of grad...

Consciousness CLEARS the mind

A full understanding of consciousness requires that we identify the brain processes from which conscious experiences emerge. What are these processes, and what is their utility in supporting successful adaptive behaviors? Adaptive Resonance Theory (ART) predicted a functional link between processes of Consciousness, Learning, Expectation, Attention, Resonance and Synchrony (CLEARS), including t...

Planning for US Precision Medicine Initiative underway.

While continuing to defend his besieged health-care reform law against lawsuits and repeal threats, US President Barack Obama is championing a new health initiative. This one also has a bold goal: to radically change the medical treatment patients receive in the USA. “I want the country that eliminated polio and mapped the human genome to lead a new era of medicine—one that delivers the right t...

First Them, Then Us