In the year 1665 Sigismund Elsholtz first attempted intravenous anaesthesia by injecting a solution of opiate to obtain insensibility. It was not until 1872, that Ore, Myer and Witzel experimented with chloral hydrate on animals, but this method was not continued. The real work on intravenous anaesthesia started about I905 when Fedorow, St. Petersburg, reported his results on 530 cases in which...

Newton grew up with a vulnerable and eccentric character besides having a low self-esteem, and he was someone who only uncommonly developed any close relationships. On review it is argued that his distrust and suspicions of others, and the fear that he might be harmed by criticism and his discoveries stolen, followed from his mother's separation from him in childhood and not, as has been claime...

In previous work, Levesque proposed an extension to classical databases that would allow for a certain form of incomplete first-order knowledge. Since this extension was sufficient to make full logical deduction undecidable, he also proposed an alternative reasoning scheme with desirable logical properties. He also claimed (without proof) that this reasoning could be implemented efficiently usi...

In the year 1665 Sigismund Elsholtz first attempted intravenous anaesthesia by injecting a solution of opiate to obtain insensibility. It was not until 1872, that Ore, Myer and Witzel experimented with chloral hydrate on animals, but this method was not continued. The real work on intravenous anaesthesia started about I905 when Fedorow, St. Petersburg, reported his results on 530 cases in which...

A theorem by Galbraith, Malone-Lee, and Smart (GMLS) from 2002 showed that, for Schnorr signatures, single-user security tightly implies multi-user security. Recently, Bernstein pointed to an error in the above theorem and promoted a key-prefixing variant of Schnorr signatures for which he proved a tight implication from single to multi-user security. Even worse, he identified an “apparently in...

The evaluation of definite integrals has attracted the scientific community, both professional and amateurs, for a long time. Some of these evaluations are collected in tables. The authors’ favorite one is by I. Gradshteyn and I. Ryzhik [11]. It was the naive attempt to prove all the formulas in [11] that produced [6]. A recent review of this book [10] describes how R. Feynman ’once claimed tha...

Dr. Shanahan has published two papers (Thermochim. Acta 428 (2005) 207, Thermochim. Acta 382 (2002) 95) in which he argues that excess heat claimed to be produced by cold fusion is actually caused by errors in heat measurement. In particular, he proposes that unrecognized changes in the calibration constant are produced by changes in the locations where heat is being generated within the electr...

for two inches up the vaginal wall. After this the child was born with forceps, and before the placenta came away the wound was carefully stitched up in layers by iodised catgut, bringing the ends of muscle together. The skin was sewed with silkworm gut. He claimed for this incision that it saved detachment of the levator ani from the symphysis and prevented prolapse of the anterior vaginal wal...

A number of mathematicians worked on 3-dimensional manifolds in the 50’s. (I was certainly one of them.) But I believe that the most important contribution was made by just one person. Christos Papakyriakopoulos had no regular academic position, and worked very much by himself, concentrating on old and difficult problems. We were both in Princeton during this period, and I saw him fairly often,...

While delighted to see that the prestigious Ceylon Medical Journal has published an article on the important topic of tobacco, alcohol and doctors [1], and fully agreeing with much of what Carlo Fonseka has written, I am concerned about the potential misinterpretation of his passage about “Famous soft drug addicts”. He mentions the case of some famous people who used tobacco and later died “in ...