fter a long day’s work on my internal medicine clerkship as a medical student, I waited at the sixth floor elevator at 11:00 pm. An unassuming elderly man whom I met earlier that night in the emergency room approached me. With a touch of timidity in his voice, he asked if I could spare a minute of my time. Piercing through the humility and kindness that I had come to realize were constantly pre...

In the last fifty years, which have seen so much achieved in the protection of infant life, little has been added to our understanding of the unreliability of lactation; yet the key to this riddle would remove what is still the greatest risk surrounding the first weeks of life. In the attempt, which will be described here, to find part of the solution, lactation's common tendency to fail will b...

Physician burnout is a real phenomenon that impacts us all, even from the early days of our training in medical school, residency, and fellowship (1). In a recent study by Goldhagen et al., the investigators reported an alarmingly high rate of burnout (approximately 80%) among resident physicians (2). As a mother of two young boys, a pediatric intensivist, and a physician scientist, I am acutel...

the significance of mysticism can be traced in relying on illumination rather than logic and reasoning to discover the truth. theoretically speaking, mysticism means having belief in understanding the truth and practically speaking it means leaving superficial customs and resorting to suffering. mysticism among muslims is exclusive to mystics who have changed names over time. sufi is someone wh...

We study the repeated use of a monotonic recording medium—such as punched tape or photographic plate—where marks can be added at any time but never erased. (For practical purposes, also the electromagnetic “ether” falls into this class.) Our emphasis is on the case where the successive users act independently and selfishly, but not maliciously; typically, the “first user” would be a blind natur...

M view pre-conquest England, before William the Conqueror in 1066, as a period of little international trade, no economic activity, and few urban centers. However, Anglo-Saxon England did contain a remarkable degree of “urbanism” in a period dominated by rural agricultural settlements and high status portable wealth. The urban, economic sphere was centered on emporia – organized merchant commun...

In their article in the current issue of Clinical Chemistry, Farrell et al. (1 ) describe the latest in a number of studies (2, 3 ) highlighting the method-related variability in serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25-OHD) results. There is common agreement that 25-OHD is a “difficult” analyte. That quality is generally ascribed to its hydrophobic nature, its existence in several different molecular for...

November 1, 2016 marks the 50 anniversary of the establishment of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) (the Division of Environmental Health Sciences was founded at this time and in January, 1969 it was elevated to institute status) (Hawkins, 1987). In the first week of December 2016, NIEHS will host the first ever Environmental Health Science FEST (EHS FEST; Faciliti...

introduction after the rapid population growth in the iranian cities, these cities have experienced great changes. the physical structures of the cities are eroded and the managers have no attention to them. many immigrants entered the cities  have dwelled in the inefficient urban textures like in the marginal areas and old textures. thus, the environmental quality of place has been weak. undes...

Imagine you are 55 years old and moving to a different city new “home.” The only time you’ve lived anywhere but your lifelong family home was when went college; even then, older brother roommate, all courses were together! You notice there is lot of hustle bustle going on in family’s home. People don’t know furniture out trucks, packing away books boxes, touching most cherished personal possess...