What is this thing called frequency?

What is this thing called somnolence?

What is this thing called pain?

To paraphrase Cole Porter's famous 1926 song, "What is this thing called pain? This funny thing called pain, just who can solve its mystery?" Pain, like love, is all consuming: when you have it, not much else matters, and there is nothing you can do about it. Unlike love, however, we are actually beginning to tease apart the mystery of pain. The substantial progress made over the last decade in...

This thing called life

Academic pursuits are inseparable from the medium within which they take place - life. The lives of medical trainees can present many challenges that are independent of academic demands. Poor psychological health has been found to develop in medical trainees. Can medical educators minimize this decline in well-being? Positive education - learning skills for traditional academia and to foster ha...

What is this thing called 'natural'? The nature-culture divide in climate change and biodiversity policy

Sean Penn's Into the Wild is a magnificent, epic film that tells an intriguing story of the wilderness. The film, based on Jon Krakauer's book of the same title, is about a young man who leaves what he perceives to be false and materialistic life behind to enter the wild in search of the pure and authentic. In an interview about the film, Sean Penn said that, while human inauthenticity and corr...

The modellers' encounter with ecological theory. Or, what is this thing called `growth rate'?

Imagine a group of quantitative scientists, such as statisticians or mathematicians, with only a textbook knowledge of ecology, who are charged with analyzing a dataset of population counts. Let us call these scientists the “Modellers”. The Modellers feel that if their analysis is to be relevant to ecologists, it should relate to what they understand to be the most important notion in populatio...