What comes first: The fault or the ductile shear zone?

A ductile shear zone terminating a brittle strike-slip fault: The gypsum- dominated Paluzza-Comeglians shear zone as western extension of the Fella- Save fault, Southern Alps

Compressive and extensive horsetails are common structures on the lateral termination of brittle strike-slip faults, which forms within the shallow continental crust. Here we report another possibility, the lateral termination of a brittle strike-slip fault in a formation-parallel low-temperature ductile shear zone within sulphatic, gypsum-dominated evaporites. In the Southern Alps, over a dist...

Public health or human rights: what comes first?

Respect for human rights is a defining feature of harm reduction, which is commonly characterised as a public health-based movement. The importance it attaches to ‘user-friendliness’ and the view that drug users have a right to the same respect and dignity that other users of health and social care services receive is largely undisputed among harm reductionists. Within harm reduction there is a...

Obesity and Crohn's disease: what comes first, the egg or the chicken?

It was with great interest that we read the paper entitled “Body composition in patients with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis”, recently published in Arquivos de Gastroenterologia, by Back IR et al. In this interesting cross-sectional study in 141 inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) patients, using the body mass index (BMI), 40.74% of Crohn’s disease (CD) and 52.87% of ulcerative colitis (U...

Malformations of the Left Ventricle: What Comes First: Form or Function?

What comes first, misshape or dysfunction? The view from metabolic excess

In typical cultured animal cells, mitochondria exist in shapes ranging from long interconnected tubules, often clustered in the perinuclear region of the cell, to small spherical forms in the cell periphery. However, mitochondrial appearance at any given moment in time is only a snapshot of dynamic change of morphology, which may or may not be the same in future observations dependent on the st...