Salvador Moncada — whose work on the signalling molecule nitric oxide has made him one of biomedicine's most cited scientists — was once described by his boss as capable of running not just an excellent department but also a country. The time was the late 1970s and the boss was James Black, later to become a Nobel prizewinner. Both men were at the research laboratories of the pharmaceutical com...

Background Breath-holding spells (BHS) are brief periods when young children stop breathing for up to 1 minute and are widely recognized types of non-epileptic severe occasions in early stages of childhood. This study aimed to evaluate QTd and QTc changes in children with breath-holding spells compared with healthy children. <stron...

Few voting systems in the world possess a feature set as rich as the Hungarian electoral law, which incorporates three distinct sets of districts, a mixed-member system, a two-round system (2RS) (using two different criteria for run-off qualification), two potentially separate legal thresholds, two different sets of rules for proportional representation (PR), plus a few additional twists relate...

You do not know who this Zhuangzi is, not even if it is the name of a man; you don’t know either what a shi or a cheng is. But on the basis of the author's authority, you believe that the sentence “Zhuangzi's principle is that you cannot get a shi without having a cheng” is true. You do not understand this sentence, for you do not know what it means, therefore you don't believe that Zhuangzi's ...

QUESTION I have children in my clinic who experience seizurelike episodes in which they cry and hold their breath to the point of cyanosis and loss of consciousness. Their examination or investigation findings are normal and referral to a pediatric specialist results in no further investigation. Are breath-holding spells common, and what type of investigation is needed? ANSWER A breath-holdin...

We prove here that, for most convex bodies, the space of all holding circles has infinitely many components.