Improved detection and monitoring of biodiversity is critical at a time when Earth’s biodiversity loss due to human activities is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. We face the largest loss of biodiversity in human history, a loss which has been called the “sixth mass extinction” (Leakey 1996; Kolbert 2014), given that its mag-nitude is in proportion to past…
Shortly after three-o’clock on 28th July 2017, in a private room of a specialised hospice in suburban London, staffdisconnected the breathing machine that was keeping alive 11-month old infant, Charlie Gard. Lying on either side of him, his parents Connie Yates and Chris Gard held his hands, leaned close, and talked to him. They spoke to him of how proud they were of him. They saw him open hi…
An unexpected and enviable problem has emerged in the US: the existence of an excess of quality television series sometimes known as ‘peak TV’. The year 2015 beat the previous record with the transmission of more than four hundred titles. It is no wonder, then, that the special issue of Entertainment Weekly dated 18 September of that year, which provides a preview of t…
Questions of responsibility arise at all levels of health care. Most prominent has been the issue of patient responsibility. Some health conditions that risk death or serious harm are partly the result of lifestyle behaviours such as smoking, lack of exercise, or extreme sports. Are patients with such conditions responsible for them? If so, might healthcare providers, be they state-run systems …
This holds true even more today than in 2009 with the exponential use of social media as an information sourced by patients and clinicians alike. Since its first publication, this book has been the go to resource for accurate knowledge in common and urgent dermatological problems. Its essential role in supporting their workplace learning is highlighted by the 8,843 downloads and 50,000 requests…
It is possible that in the distant future we will look back at human history and speak of three major disruptive technological innovations. The transition from a hunter-gatherer culture to a sedentary agrarian culture with animal husbandry in the Neolithic Age, the transition to the machine age based on fossil fuels in the nineteenth century, and finally the digital revoluti…
This is a course in Standard Chinese, a language that is often colloquially referred to as Mandarin. The origins of this language and its position in the Chinese-speaking world will be discussed below, in the section on linguistic background.