Physicians and family members alike have long been curious about the historical origins of Huntington’s disease. Despite the fact that families with “hereditary chorea” were described in medical literature for the first time in the 1840s, most authors agree that the genetic abnormality and most likely the panoply of symptoms we know today as Huntington’s disease were present centuries earlier i...

Boabs, a close relation of the African baobabs, are found only in the Kimberley region of Western Australia and a region close by in the Northern Territory. Here several of the words for the boab tree and its parts are examined with special emphasis on loanwords which cross language family boundaries going in a west-east direction. It is proposed that this linguistic diffusion may reflect dispe...