On the menu at the Rossmount Inn in Saint Andrews, New Brunswick, on the Atlantic coast of Canada, you may find kelp-wrapped salmon– avocado tartare with sesame cranberry– apple vinaigrette, citrus–soy glaze, cilantro, and chives. It sounds mouthwatering, but this is no ordinary seafood. The farmed seaweed (Saccharina latissima) and Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) are not only side by side on the...

On December 2, when Venezuelans delivered President Hugo Chávez his first electoral defeat in nine years, most analysts were taken by surprise. According to o⁄cial results, 50.7 percent of voters rejected Chávez’s proposed constitutional reform, which would have expanded executive power, gotten rid of presidential term limits, and paved the way for the construction of a “socialist” economy. It ...

In his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that a scientific revolution takes place as the result of an episode of noncumulative changes where one paradigm is replaced in whole or in part. Kuhn observed that the process of a scientific revolution begins with an existing paradigm, during which normal science is performed. Eventually, an increase in anomaly leads to a...

Seldom does a disruptive technology just appear on the scene like an intergalactic hitchhiker on a meteor or asteroid. The smart phone might seem to be one of those. It revolutionized the way we think about and conduct our lives. It’s really not a phone at all but a mini-computer with which we make the occasional real-time voice call. Problem-based Learning (PBL) and the Multiple Mini Interview...

Editorial NIECR-a quiet revolution. If someone was to ask you to consider important advances in medicine, perhaps like me, you would think of Fleming's discovery of penicillin in the 1940s or the introduction of the portable defibrillator by Pantridge and team in the 1960s. I wonder if you would include today's health gadgets like the Fitbit. Another, quieter gradual revolution is going on in N...

Endovenous techniques (laser ablation, radiofrequency ablation and foam sclerotherapy) to treat varicose veins have increased rapidly during the past decade, and in some countries largely replaced the traditional high ligation and stripping, well before long-term data were available. These methods were introduced in the hope of being more effective than surgery with better outcomes, particularl...

Background: High-resolution magic angle proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (HR 1H MAS MRS) provides a broad metabolic mapping of intact tumor samples and allows for microscopy investigations of the samples after spectra acquisition. Experimental studies have suggested that the method can be used for detection of apoptosis, but this has not been investigated in a clinical setting so far. We ...

The realisation that in the majority of sexually-reproducing organisms from angiosperm to primates females often mate with multiple males (polyandry) is not only revolutionising our understanding of sexual selection, sexual conflict and sex roles, but is also having profound repercussions for a number of other key evolutionary and ecological processes such as the evolution of sociality, sex chr...