On 14th May 1610, François Ravaillac, a delusional mystic, assassinated King Henri IV. Under the Ancien Regime, regicide was considered as a supreme act of patricide and received the ultimate punishment even if the perpetrator showed obvious signs of insanity. What would the situation be today? A study of this notorious historical episode provides a reflection on the way dangerousness linked to...

Frederic Gibbs, the peerless expert on electroencephalogrphy was summoned to provide opinion on the EEG tracing of Jack Ruby, who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the American President, in 1963. Gibbs pleaded that the tracing suggested features indicative of psychomotor epilepsy and Ruby killed Oswald in a state of fugue. His view was not agreed upon but Gib...

A major new accelerator with unique capabilities for studies of electromagnetic interactions, neutron physics, and applied reactor technology will be operating at LRL's Livermore Laboratory by mid1969. The AEC recently announced the allocation of $4.1 million to build and house the new 100 MeV "electronpositron" linear accelerator. The machine will be similar in principle to the 25 MeV Linac wh...

Dido’s Problem The Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 B.C.) tells in his epic Aeneid the story of queen Dido, the daughter of the Phoenician king of the 9th century B.C. After the assassination of her husband by her brother she fled to a haven near Tunis. There she asked the local leader, Yarb, for as much land as could be enclosed by the hide of a bull. Since the deal seemed very modest,...

Computer games such as JFK Reloaded and 9-11 Survivor not only aim at an accurate documentation of particular events—such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Twin Towers attack—but also at the playful re-enactment of these traumatic events. In this article, I discuss whether the phrase “documentary computer games” is useful in defining these games. These “docu-games” try to combine ...

The first year of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s second term has been disastrous. A series of crises has occurred, from the assassination of Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov in Grozny in May 2004, to the widespread demonstrations against the government’s seriously flawed attempt to replace social and other benefits with cash payments. Fighters staged raids in Grozny and Ingushetia, the gove...

The concept of studying approaches to public figures (i.e., physical pursuit or stalking) arose as a proxy measure to aid in the development of tools to prevent assassination, a low base rate event. In this commentary, we review the origins of this concept and the historical record of public figure attacks in the United States that formed the empirical basis of the concept, we describe case exa...

The year 2014 marks the centennial of events that led to the First World War ("the war to end all wars") following the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire. It also marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of Stephen Rothman and the 60th anniversary of the publication of his epic textbook The Physiology and Biochemistry of the Skin. In this review, we doc...