In the ballot on strike action, junior doctors voted almost unanimously in favour (98% of 28 305; response rate 76%). Consultants are offering their full support. GPs have been marching alongside. Jeremy Hunt’s biggest success as health secretary has been to unite the medical profession—against him.What’s next? I wish that the Department of Health would sit downwith the Advisory, Conciliation a...

—Leaf mass per area (MA) is a central ecological trait that is intercorrelated with leaf life span, photosynthetic rate, nutrient concentration, and palatability to herbivores. These coordinated variables form a globally convergent leaf economics spectrum, which represents a general continuum running from rapid resource acquisition to maximized resource retention. Leaf economics are little stud...

Natural resource prices and costs of extraction have declined simultaneously with increasing quantities of extraction for a long time. In a Hotelling sense this indicates decreasing scarcity since low cost resources normally would be used first and quantities of extraction normally would decrease over time. The main reason for the trend being opposite to Hotelling characteristics is usually tho...

Glutamate continues to surprise us. Today’s graduate students will find it hard to believe that a mere 25 to 30 years ago proponents of a neurotransmitter role of glutamate were decidedly avant-garde and that the suggestion that glutamate might play a specific role in the pathophysiology of neurological and psychiatric diseases was considered heretic at best. What a difference a few years can m...

Currently there is much excitement in certain quarters about antisense oligonucleotides, both as the drugs of the future for treatment of cancer and viral infections, most notably AIDS, and also as genetic tools for generating mutant phenocopies without genomic mutation in investigations of mammalian gene function. The extent of this excitement is reflected in the proliferation of antisense bio...

Climate warming at high latitudes is expected to increase root and microbial respiration and thus cause an increase in soil respiration. We measured the root and microbial components of soil respiration near Fairbanks, Alaska, in 2000 and 2001, in three black spruce (Picea mariana (Mill) B.S.P.) forests. We hypothesized faster decomposition correlates with greater amounts of both root and micro...

On March 13, 2012 PLoS Medicine published an analysis by Lisa Cosgrove and Sheldon Krimsky [1] that examined the financial conflicts of interest of members of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) responsible for updating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the so-called bible of psychiatry. Despite a new APA policy designed to address conflicts of interest (CO...

My subject tonight is the dichotomy between the success of individual physicians and what I believe to be the failure of our profession to assume a true leadership role in furthering the health of Americans. I believe that there is a narrow window remaining during which professional leadership is possible, but I believe even that window is beginning to close. Health care is about access, qualit...

It is nowmore than a decade since Allison Abbot of Nature wrote an editorial using the first part of the above title (Abbott, 2003a) and, inside the same issue, under the title of ‘Nature’s Third Dimension’(Abbott, 2003b), described the efforts of a number of laboratories that had come to terms with using three-dimensional (3D) strategies, and described in more detail our laboratory’s developme...

F or this special issue of PNAS, it seems appropriate to begin with a brief commentary on the path(s) leading to where the discipline of electrochemistry is today. The papers in this issue serve as a sampling of the current themes and directions; we thank the authors for their contributions. We should also point to a nice collection of historical perspectives gathered together by Leddy et al. (...