Colony collapse disorder (CCD) has puzzled beekeepers and entomologists alike since it first emerged in the US in the autumn of 2006. Its hallmark is that colonies are apparently abandoned without significant numbers of dead bees being found. Similar problems were then also found in the UK and other European countries (Curr. Biol. 18, R1073). The British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) has now re...

June 30, 1908, 7:14 a.m., central Siberia—Semen Semenov, a local farmer, saw “the sky split in two. Fire appeared high and wide over the forest. . . . From . . . where the fire was, came strong heat. . . . Then the sky shut closed, and a strong thump sounded, and I was thrown a few yards.... After that such noise came, as if . . . cannons were firing, the earth shook .. .” Such is the harrowing...

From the Clinical Pathological Conference Series, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston (J.M.C., J.T.K., B.D.L., J.L.); and the Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology/ Oncology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (A.C.). Address reprint requests to Dr. Loscalzo at the Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medic...

The economic opportunity hypothesis states that perceived shrinkage of opportunity discourages women or couples from embarking on marriage or reproduction. On the contrary, the sense that opportunity is expanding encourages couples to raise their family-size target. The hypothesis assumes that humans are genetically programmed to maximize successful reproduction by having more offspring when en...

OBJECTIVES To determine whether repeated mystery shopping visits with feedback improve pharmacy performance over nine visits and to determine what factors predict an appropriate outcome. DESIGN Prospective, parallel, repeated intervention, repeated measures mystery shopping (pseudopatient) design. SETTING Thirty-six community pharmacies in metropolitan Sydney, Australia in March-October 201...

The economic literature on marriage identifies a number of benefits of marriage and discusses mechanisms that cause societies to prefer certain marital structures such as polygyny or monogamy. In principle, however, these benefits and mechanisms might lead societies towards polyandry and even cenogamy. The rareness of polyandry and the absence of cenogamy, however, clearly indicate that importa...

We discuss the problem of finding an upper bound for the number of equilibrium points of a potential of several fixed point charges in Rn. This question goes back to J. C. Maxwell and M. Morse. Using fewnomial theory we show that for a given number of charges there exists an upper bound independent of the dimension, and show it to be at most 12 for three charges. We conjecture an exact upper bo...

A 20-year-old woman underwent sleep-deprived EEG (figure) for evaluation of possible seizure disorder. Interpret the EEG finding.