The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation promotes academic cooperation between excellent scientists and scholars from abroad and from Germany. To this end, it grants more than 700 research fellowships and research awards annually. These allow scientists and scholars from all over the world to come to Germany to work on a research project they have chosen themselves together with a host and collabo...

From 'seasonal and intermittent fevers' through 'mal'aria', to 'malaria' The parasite responsible for severe malaria (Plas-modium falciparum) has recently been demonstrated to have been transmitted to humans from gorillas, 1 a finding that substantiates an earlier hypothesis that malaria spread from monkeys to early neolithic peasants at the dawn of land cultivation. 2 The first written records...

"malaria as a disease" in the pre-DDT era must not be forgotten, for, as he states, "it is of great importance to keep alive the excitement of the malaria story, an aim to which this publication is dedicated". The author successfully meets this aim. The design of the book itself is simple and attractive and immediately offers both the specialist and non-specialist reader a fascinating insight i...

THE MARKETING SCIENCE INSTITUTE (MSI) recently released Empirical Generalizations about Marketing Impact, the eighth volume in its Relevant Knowledge Series. The book contains more than 80 empirical generalizations (EGs), contributed by about 60 academics from around the world. Each EG is summarized and documented in a standard one-page format. To the extent possible, the EGs are quantified usi...

The Second World Ayurveda Congress will be hosted by the University of Pune during November 5–12, 2006, with the overall theme, ‘Ayurveda for the Future’. It is anticipated that the Congress will generate even greater global interest in Ayurveda than the First World Ayurveda Congress, held at Cochin, Kerala, in November 2002, visited by over 300 000 people. For those who wish to attend the Cong...

We propose a new framework to extract the activity-related component in the BOLD functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) signal. As opposed to traditional fMRI signal analysis techniques, we do not impose any prior knowledge of the event timing. Instead, our basic assumption is that the activation pattern is a sequence of short and sparsely-distributed stimuli, as is the case in slow event...