Madness mesmerizes, and the madness of the great and powerful cannot help but exert a magnetic pull on the historical imagination. In Mad princes of renaissance Germany, H C Erik Midelfort constructs a series of linked microhistories around the mental illnesses of about twenty German princes and princesses. The manifestations of their disorders ranged from the "weakness" of old duke Wilhelm the...

The recent discovery of functional brown adipose tissue in human adults raised this tissue again into the focus of current investigations concerning human energy homeostasis. Brown fat is a key thermogenic tissue and is essential for non-shivering thermogenesis in the human newborn and hibernating mammals. This review highlights the biological and molecular aspects of brown adipose tissue devel...

Object-oriented techniques stress modularity through narrow and rigidly deened interfaces as a way of achieving low coupling between individual software components and high cohesion in the implementation of each component. Unfortunately, in a distributed environment object-oriented interfaces are usually only enforced and usable through language mechanisms or rigid programming conventions. Both...

The permanent cellular constituents of the heart include cardiac fibroblasts, myocytes, endothelial cells, and vascular smooth muscle cells. Previous studies have demonstrated that there are undulating changes in cardiac cell populations during embryonic development, through neonatal development and into the adult. Transient cell populations include lymphocytes, mast cells, and macrophages, whi...