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#BlackHistoryMonth It was as a pupil at Wolverhampton Grammar School that Robert William Felkin met the explorer David Livingstone, who inspired him with his tales of Africa. And when he met A M Mackay, a medical missionary from Uganda, in London in 1877 at the age of 24, he became determined to visit Africa.

It was as a pupil at Wolverhampton Grammar School 1that Robert William Felkin met the explorer David Livingstone, who inspired him with his tales of Africa. And when he met A M Mackay, a medical missionary from Uganda, in London in 1877 at the age of 24, he became determined to visit Africa.

By 1875 he had become a medical student at Edinburgh University, but before completing his training, he was sent to Uganda in 1878 by the Church Missionary Society. He travelled up the Nile to Khartoum, where he met General Gordon, and then on through what was then wild and unmapped country to the Great Lakes. There he met Emin Pasha, the Governor of the Equatorial Province, and was presented to King M’tesa, whose personal physician he became in 1879. When a Muslim anti-missionary movement threatened the lives of his fellow Christians, Felkin warned the King that, should any harm come to them, a great disaster would befall his people. As a sign he foretold that the sun would be darkened; in due course the anticipated eclipse occurred and Felkin was established as a great “medicine man.” During his stay in Uganda he studied the local diseases and also undertook anthropological measurements of the pygmies. Of particular interest, though, were his studies on childbirth.

In 1880 he returned down the Nile and on to England in the company of envoys of King M’tesa to Queen Victoria. Later that year he returned to Africa, travelling widely but spending most of his time in Zanzibar where he actively campaigned against the slave trade. In 1881 he returned to Edinburgh to complete his medical studies (LRCP, LRCS, Ed, 1884). While still a medical student he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a member of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and a corresponding Fellow of the Berlin Anthropological Society. As a final year student he gave a lecture to the Edinburgh Obstetrical Society on 9 January 1884 entitled “Notes on Labour in Central Africa.” 2 It is from this lecture that the following fascinating account of a Caesarean delivery is taken:

Continue reading “Robert Felkin MD (1853–1926) and Caesarean delivery in Central Africa” | >

Why does time seem to move forward? It’s a riddle that’s puzzled physicists for well over a century, and they’ve come up with numerous theories to explain time’s arrow. The latest, though, suggests that while time moves forward in our universe, it may run backwards in another, mirror universe that was created on the “other side” of the Big Bang.

Two leading theories propose to explain the direction of time by way of the relatively uniform conditions of the Big Bang. At the very start, what is now the universe was homogeneously hot, so much so that matter didn’t really exist. It was all just a superheated soup. But as the universe expanded and cooled, stars, galaxies, planets, and other celestial bodies formed, birthing the universe’s irregular structure and raising its entropy.

One theory, proposed in 2004 by Sean Carroll, now a professor at Caltech, and Jennifer Chen, then his graduate student, says that time moves forward because of the contrast in entropy between then and now, with an emphasis on the fact that the future universe will so much more disordered than the past. That movement toward high entropy gives time its direction.

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If pairing wine with food is an art, then consider this episode a masterpiece. The guys drink their way around town, from donut shops to Thai food in a tattoo parlor.

Weed MARIJUANA Travel Steak Culture Cannabis Munchies meatballs Documentary Hip-Hop seafood Pasta Brooklyn DABBING cooking moonshine duck feast wine rap Queens Tattoos history Italian food NEW YORK CITY Red Hook BBQ Fine Dining Smoking Tattooing friendship concert Thai Food Donuts vice_videos: premiere spirits sauce Natural Wine barbeque food pairings clams chicken parm chiense food carrol gardens.

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Eva Ramón, a #Mexican Scientist may have done something amazing.

The present study aimed to determine the effectiveness of photodynamic therapy (PDT), using δ-aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA), in the elimination of premalignant cervical lesions in Mexican patients with human papillomavirus (HPV) infection and/or cervical intraepithelial neoplasia (CIN). Thirty women diagnosed with CIN I and/or positive for HPV participated in the study.

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Quantum physics sets the laws that dominate the universe at a small scale. The ability to harness quantum phenomena could lead to machines like quantum computers, which are predicted to perform certain calculations much faster than conventional computers. One major problem with building quantum processors is that the tracking and controlling quantum systems in real time is a difficult task because quantum systems are overwhelmingly fragile: Manipulating these systems carelessly introduces significant errors in the final result. New work by a team at Aalto could lead to precise quantum computers.

The researchers report controlling in a custom-designed electrical circuit called a transmon. Chilling a transmon chip to within a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero induces a , and the chip starts to behave like an artificial atom. One of the features that interests researchers is that the of the transmon can only take specific values, called . The energy levels are like steps on a ladder: A person climbing the ladder must occupy a step, and can’t hover somewhere between two steps. Likewise, the transmon energy can only occupy the set values of the energy levels. Shining microwaves on the circuit induces the transmon to absorb the energy and climb up the rungs of the ladder.

In work published 8 February in the journal Science Advances, the group from Aalto University led by Docent Sorin Paraoanu, senior university lecturer in the Department of Applied Physics, has made the transmon jump more than one energy level in a single go. Previously, this has been possible only by very gentle and slow adjustments of the microwave signals that control the device. In the new work, an additional microwave control signal shaped in a very specific way allows a fast, precise change of the energy level. Dr. Antti Vepsäläinen, the lead author, says, “We have a saying in Finland: ‘hiljaa hyvää tulee’ (slowly does it). But we managed to show that by continuously correcting the state of the system, we can drive this process more rapidly and at .”

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Or bad drugs given to good people by doctors who were clueless 🙈

‘’The study found that the gut microbes were responsible for producing 20 percent to 80 percent of the circulating toxic metabolites derived from the three drugs.

People sometimes suffer toxic side effects from drugs that help many others. Yale scientists have identified a surprising explanation—the gut microbiome.

Continue reading “Microbiome could be culprit when good drugs do harm” | >

CRISPR is a technique that is revolutionizing biomedical research through high-precision genome editing. However, even though it allows the creation or correction of mutations consisting of a single or few nucleotides with relative ease, it still possesses limitations for larger fragments of DNA in the genome. For instance, the genomic insertion of a gene that produces a fluorescent protein such as the widely-used GFP suffers from poor efficiency and involves complicated cloning steps.

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