Once again I have had the enjoyable task of preparing an annual review of General Surgery. Once again, it represents a digest of papers and books that I have found of particular interest and value during the last 12 months and it must therefore have the rather personal flavour of the author's surgical hobbies. This year's topics include the treatment of parotid tumours, pre-operative preparatio...

Introduction This year the subjects that have caught my eye have been some of the major problems in cardiovascular surgery, particularly the epidemic of coronary bypass operations which are now being performed, some of the controversial topics which surround management of patients with breast cancer and a number of interesting papers concerning patients with acute abdominal pain. I must then co...

The Ellis wormhole is known to be an exact solution of the Einstein–scalar system where the scalar field has negative kinetic energy (phantom). We show here that the same geometry (in 3+1 dimensions) can also be obtained with ‘tachyon matter’ as a source term in the field equations and a positive cosmological constant. The kink–like tachyon field profile and the nature of the tachyon potential ...

Ellis-van Creveld (EVC) syndrome or chondroectodermal dysplasia is a rare autosomal recessive disorder characterized by a variable spectrum of clinical findings. Classical EVC syndrome comprises a tetrad of clinical manifestations of chondrodystrophy, polydactyly, ectodermal dysplasia, and cardiac defects. In several case reports, dysplasia involving other organs has also been identified. Hemat...

R Ellis Shope, one of the world’s most distinguished arbovirologists and a dear friend of many colleagues around the world, died of complications of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in Galveston, Texas, on January 19, 2004, at age 74. Bob is survived by his wife, Virginia; his daughters, Deborah Shope and Bonnie (Shope) Rice; his sons, Peter and Steve; his brothers, Thomas and Richard; his sister,...

Let G be a group definable in a theory T . For every model M of T , the space SG(M) of the complete G-types over M is a G M -flow. We compare the Ellis semigroups related to the flows SG(M) and SG(N) when M ≺ ∗ N , focusing particularly on the groups into which the minimal left ideals in these semigroups split. In the case where T is an o-minimal expansion of the theory of reals and G is defina...