BACKGROUND Height of individuals has long been considered as a significant index of nutrition and health of a population; still, there is little information regarding the trends of height and weight among developing or transitional countries. We assessed the secular trends in height and weight in children of the Seychelles, a rapidly developing island state in the Indian Ocean (African region)....

Lawrence C. Katz died of melanoma on November 26, 2005, at the age of 48. He was amongst the most creative and influential neuroscientists of his time. His contributions were both scientific and personal, providing as much to the development of people as to scientific discovery. These affections were always inextricably intertwined, his love of scientific beauty and discovery, and his caring fo...

Systemically administered pravastatin effectively treats diabetic retinopathy without central nervous system side effects. The efflux transport mechanism of pravastatin from the brain has already been clarified. In this study, the influx of pravastatin across the bloodretinal and blood-brain barriers (BRB and BBB) and the efflux of pravastatin from the retina were investigated using rats. Prava...

During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Robert Paul Lanza studied embryonic stem cells [5], tissues, and endangered species as chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology, Incorporated in Worcester, Massachusetts. Lanza's team cloned the endangered species of gaur Bos gaurus [6]. Although the gaur did not survive long, Lanza successfully cloned another cow [7]-like creature, c...

At the end of my term of office as Editor-in-Chief of Acta Otorhinolaryngologica Italica, i should like to briefly recall some of the results achieved. The principal aim indicated by the Board of the italian Society of otorhinolaryngology – head and neck Surgery (Sio) was to work towards the journal which had then only recently been published in English under the Editor-in-Chief, at that time D...

The congenital abnormality of the heart consisting of pulmonary stenosis, ventricular septal defect, and an overriding aorta was described in 1673 by the Danish scholar, Nicolas Stensen (Warburg, 1942). Fallot's (Fallot, 1888) description included right ventricular hypertrophy as an essential part of the malformation. Stensen had made no mention of this, possibly because he reported on the hear...