Contents for the Spring 2007 Issue

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Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is a growing problem in hospitals today. Scientists are continually searching for ways to win this race against mutating bacteria, and a surprising solution may lie in a seemingly unrelated field—linguistics. Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a linguistic model of existing antimicrobial peptides, treating the amino acid sequences as [...]

In the 1920s, many Americans and Europeans were regularly consuming radium. Marketed as a cure-all, radium was an ingredient in a variety of over-the-counter nostrums, from face creams to tonic waters. It was used to treat “almost everything from impotence to insanity” (1). One company advertised it as “liquid sunshine” (2). Famously, radium was used [...]

Working in France in 1903, Augustin Cabanès and Lucien Nass declared, “De toutes les armes que le génie de l’homme a inventées pour nuire à son semblable, le poison est la plus lâche; l’empoisonneur est le plus méprisable des criminels” (1). Although these authors were trying to describe the opinion of poisons in France, they [...]

In 2006, approximately 1,399,790 new cases of cancer were diagnosed (1). Current treatments and lifestyle changes have significantly improved the fate of these patients; the death rate from the most common cancers—prostrate, breast, lung, and colorectal—and other cancer types is decreasing (1). While the outcome for cancer patients has improved, overall, the incidence of cancer [...]

Within one second of the detonation, a 20 pounds per square inch (psi) overpressure will be generated out to a distance of 0.4 miles from the Empire State Building. Everything in this circle is utterly demolished. Those within this circle will be exposed to sudden pressure effects that destroys lungs and ear drums, shrapnel from nearby objects, and a thermal emission of such intensity that immediate death results.