Why are clinical costs so high?

Why are clicks so exclusive ?

Clicks occur abundantly in the languages of southern Africa, but are not found anywhere else. This is unexpected since the clicks seem to be both auditorily salient and easy to produce. This paper suggests that the reason for the areal skewness of clicks lies in the African phonetictypological environment rather than in production or perception constraints. In particular, clicks are limited to ...

Why are we doing so little clinical research? Part 2: Why clinical research is neglected.

Family medicine is a clinical discipline. So why are so few family physicians doing clinical research? Certainly there are notable exceptions to that generalization. But if you look at our publication record as a whole, clinical descriptive research is only a small part. Yet it is an important issue, with consequences for our place in medical schools. In this editorial, I want to address this i...

Why are so many trees hollow?

In many living trees, much of the interior of the trunk can be rotten or even hollowed out. Previously, this has been suggested to be adaptive, with microbial or animal consumption of interior wood producing a rain of nutrients to the soil beneath the tree that allows recycling of those nutrients into new growth via the trees roots. Here I propose an alternative (non-exclusive) explanation: suc...

Why Are So Many Bird Flowers Red?

Why are so many bird fl owers red? PLoS Biol 2(10): e350. and Luis Santamaría. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Open access, freely available online M ost bird-pollinated fl owers are both red and rich ...

Observational studies: why are they so important?