A profession's ethos is an interlacing of sentiment, value, and thought that describes its character, conveys its genius, and manifests its spirit. The ethos endures over time, serving as touchstone against which individuals may strike their actions to know their worth. As a profession's inner voice, the ethos inspires individuals and calls them back if they stray too far. This discussion of th...

P.O. Box 1 3720 BA Bilthoven The Netherlands www.rivm.nl/en Our food, our health Healthy and unhealthy diets receive a lot of attention nowadays, and there are good reasons for this. Each year, overweight and unfavourable dietary composition account for thousands of new cases of illness and unnecessary deaths. The number of young people and adults who are overweight is increasing. Foodborne inf...

© 2011 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors CMAJ, January 11, 2011, 183(1) 15 As society and health care have evolved, so too has CMAJ. Indeed, the journal is a reflection of the society in which it is firmly rooted. With its 100-year history and the many successes highlighted by CMA President Dr. Jeffrey Turnbull, CMAJ is ready to move into its second century. CMAJ has sought to disse...

Even though postgraduate medical education has been the focus of interest in anaesthesiology education, in a broader sense the entire medical community can be considered appropriate learners of anaesthesiology. Anaesthesiologists are equipped to teach physiology, pharmacology, resuscitation, pain management, perioperative assessment, and medical technology. For residency training, an approach b...

Jean Piaget was a master at observing the routine behaviors children produce as they go from knowing less to knowing more about at a task, and making inferences not only about how children understand the task at each point, but also about how they progress from one point to the next. This article examines a routine behavior that Piaget overlooked-the spontaneous gestures speakers produce as the...

One of my favourite things to do is to ask Canadians to tell the story of how they came to be in this country. Are your ancestors First Nations or Inuit or Metis, the original people of the land? Did your forebears come here for love? For money? To escape religious persecution? Did they come looking for a better future, not for themselves, but for their children? I was born in Winnipeg, Man, an...

Can tourism be the catalyst for urban preservation while permitting the continuation of urban culture? Only if local distinctiveness, rather than preserved monuments, is what attracts tourists to an historic region, argues Orba̧sli. The author advocates preservation through a planning-management approach. This approach avoids façadism (i.e., preservation of the physical elements only), and inste...

Most of the energy we get to spend is furnished by mitochondria, minuscule living structures sitting inside our cells or dispatched back and forth within them to where they are needed. Mitochondria produce energy by burning down what remains of our meal after we have digested it, but at the cost of constantly corroding themselves and us. Here we review how our mitochondria evolved from invading...

As the readers of this journal know all too well, conducting a study takes a lot of time, energy, commitment, and, most of all, work. I do not have to list the myriad steps that need to be taken, often with delays in between, to take a study from good idea to analysis. There are often sweat and tears, if not blood, and, at the end of the process, there may be exhaustion. Then the piles of paper...