The medical writings of early medieval western Europe c. 700 – c. 1000 have often been derided for their disorganised appearance, poor Latin, nebulous conceptual framework, admixtures of magic and folklore, and general lack of those positive features that historians attribute to ancient or later medieval medicine. This paper attempts to rescue the period from its negative image. It examines a n...

In the last years network connectivity continuously expanded. However, existing collaborative environments were not designed to benefit from the fact that users are connected most of the time. For example, Wiki or version control systems allow users to work in isolation, but they tolerate blind modifications. For instance, users may concurrently perform the same task or they might work on obsol...

Dear Editor, Many years ago unprofessional supervisors were identified as one of the main reasons for the withdrawal of a student’s study. Recently in some universities, unethical supervision has become an increasing concern of students and ethic committees. The last few years has witnessed an increase in the withdrawal rate of students who quit their study because of the poor guidance of their...

In this paper, we show that quantum memory for qudit states encoded in a single photon pulsed optical field has a conceptually simple modular realization using only passive linear optics and coherent feedback. We exploit the idea that two decaying optical cavities can be coupled in a coherent feedback configuration to create an internal mode of the coupled system which is isolated and decoheren...

We report on fabrication of tubular optical waveguides buried in ZBLAN glass based on transverse femtosecond laser direct writing. Irradiation in ZBLAN with focused femtosecond laser pulses leads to decrease of refractive index in the modified region. Tubular optical waveguides of variable mode areas are fabricated by forming the four sides of the cladding with slit-shaped femtosecond laser pul...

Arnau de Vilanova, one of the most important physicians of the Latin Middle Ages, was familiar with the vast majority of Aristotle's works that had been translated into Latin. He used a wide range of them, such as the Organon--the introductory books on logic - and the natural philosophical books, which cover a different branches of knowledge. He used Aristotle as an authority, trying to reconci...

Adriane Fugh-Berman examines documents unsealed in recent litigation to investigate how pharmaceutical companies promoted hormone therapy drugs, including the use of medical writing companies to produce ghostwritten manuscripts and place them into medical journals.

Methods: First, we constructed a questionnaire based on the descriptors collected from various sources in order to elicit university teachers’ views on the importance of these descriptors. A revised version was produced based on the feedback from the initial questionnaire survey. In order to further investigate what level or levels these remaining descriptors would fall into, 35 university teac...

The paper reviews the recent progress on CO2-laser writing of long-period fiber gratings (LPFGs) in different kinds of fibers, including conventional single-mode fiber (SMF), boron-doped SMF, polarization-maintaining fiber, photonic crystal fiber, and polarization-maintaining photonic crystal fiber. In particular, we report the writing dynamics for the understanding of the physical mechanisms i...