Neurosurgery or neurological surgery, known in common parlance as brain surgery, is the medical specialty concerned with the surgical treatment of disorders which affect any portion of the nervous system including the brain, spinal cord and peripheral nervous system.
Oklo is a region near the town of Franceville, in the Haut-Ogooué province of the Central African country of Gabon. Several natural nuclear fission reactors were discovered in the uranium mines in the region in 1972.
Julius Lothar Meyer was a German chemist. He was one of the pioneers in developing the earliest versions of the periodic table of the chemical elements. The Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev and he had both worked with Robert Bunsen. Meyer never used his first given name and was known throughout his life simply as Lothar Meyer.
Stan Jones is a Libertarian Party politician who has twice run unsuccessfully for the United States Senate, in 2002 and 2006, and three times unsuccessfully as the Libertarian nominee for governor of Montana, in 2000, 2004, and 2008. He is known for his artificially induced blue-grey skin tone, caused by argyria.
Georgii Nikolayevich Flyorov was a Soviet physicist who is known for his discovery of spontaneous fission and his important contribution towards the crystallography and material science, for which, he was honored with many awards. In addition, he is also known for his letter directed to Joseph Stalin, during the midst of World War II, to start the Soviet program of nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union.
Jonathan Jones is a British art critic who has written for The Guardian since 1999. He has appeared in the BBC television series Private Life of a Masterpiece and in 2009 was a judge for the Turner Prize. He has also been a judge for the BP Portrait Award.
Clive Wearing is a British former musicologist, conductor, tenor and keyboardist who developed chronic anterograde and retrograde amnesia in 1985. Since then, he has lacked the ability to form new memories and cannot recall aspects of his memories, frequently believing that he has only recently awoken from a comatose state. In educational psychology contexts, Wearing's dual retrograde-anterograde amnesia phenomenon is often referred to as '30-second Clive' in reference to his 30-second episodic memory capacity.
Eben Alexander III is an American neurosurgeon and author. His book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife (2012) describes his near-death experience that happened in 2008 under medically-induced coma when treated for meningitis. He asserts that the coma resulted in brain death, that consciousness is not only a product of the brain and that this permits access to an afterlife.
Chemical elements may be named from various sources: sometimes based on the person who discovered it, or the place it was discovered. Some have Latin or Greek roots deriving from something related to the element, for example some use to which it may have been put.
The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness is a 2013 Japanese documentary film directed by Mami Sunada. The film follows the routines of those employed at Studio Ghibli, including filmmakers Hayao Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, and Toshio Suzuki as they work to release two films simultaneously, The Wind Rises and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya.
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements, is a 2010 book by science reporter Sam Kean. The book was first published in hardback on July 12, 2010 through Little, Brown and Company and was released in paperback on June 6, 2011 through Little, Brown and Company's imprint Back Bay Books.
When Breath Becomes Air is a non-fiction autobiographical book written by American neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi. It is a memoir about his life and battling stage IV metastatic lung cancer. It was posthumously published by Random House on January 12, 2016.
The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, also known by its full title The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of The Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery is a science book regarding the brain and its functions by Sam Kean. The Daily Telegraph described it as "A dramatic account of the gruesome accidents that shaped modern neuroscience."
Periodic Tales: The Curious Lives of the Elements is a 2011 popular science and history book by English writer Hugh Aldersey-Williams, on the history and cultural associations of the chemical elements. The book is divided into five sections, "Power", "Fire", "Craft", "Beauty", and "Earth", which group elements according to their primary cultural connotations, rather than their position on the periodic table. For certain elements such as phosphorus, the author documents his attempts to obtain samples by reproducing the original method of discovery. He also visits the site of discovery of several elements uncovered in modern times, including the famed Ytterby mine in Sweden, from which seven new elements were isolated.
James Alexander Hugh McClintock-Bunbury, known as Turtle Bunbury, is an Irish author, historian, and television presenter. He has published a number of books such as the Vanishing Ireland series, Easter Dawn -The 1916 Rising, The Glorious Madness and 1847 – A Chronicle of Genius, Generosity & Savagery.
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art is a 2020 popular science book by science journalist James Nestor. The book provides a historical, scientific and personal examination of breathing, with a specific interest in contrasting the differences between mouth breathing and nasal breathing. The book became an international bestseller, selling over two million copies worldwide.
The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science is a 2021 American nonfiction book written by Sam Kean and published by Little, Brown and Company. It features a series of stories throughout the past several centuries involving abuses and crimes committed by scientists in the pursuit of knowledge at all costs. Extensive documents and other historical sources, among additional facts portrayed through footnotes, are used to discuss the impact of various individuals from their actions, along with an appendix contemplating on the potential future crimes that may be committed by new scientific advancements.
Bismuth compounds are compounds containing the element bismuth (Bi). Bismuth forms trivalent and pentavalent compounds, the trivalent ones being more common. Many of its chemical properties are similar to those of arsenic and antimony, although they are less toxic than derivatives of those lighter elements.
Tatsuji Inouye was a Japanese ophthalmologist who studied soldiers wounded during the Russo-Japanese War and is known for his contribution to delineating cortical representation of the visual field, especially in the striate cortex. By comparing the entrance and exit wounds of bullets in the soldiers' heads to their visual deficits (scotomas), he was able to map which portions of the cortex correspond to which portions of the visual field. Importantly, he showed that more cortical area is devoted to the representation of the centre of the visual field compared than to the periphery. He was born in Tokyo and studied medicine at the University of Tokyo. He published his finding first in Leipzig in 1909.
Charles Gordon Gross was a professor of psychology and a neuroscientist who studied the sensory processing and pattern recognition in the cerebral cortex of macaque monkeys. He spent 43 years of his career at Princeton University. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and received his A.B. in 1957 from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1961. Afterward, he went on to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he conducted pioneering research on the visual cortex of monkeys. Gross made many important discoveries in his career, including the finding that neurons in the inferior temporal cortex (ITC) are selectively activated by complex objects and the discovery of "face cells," neurons that are specifically activated by the sight of faces. He also discovered hand-selective neurons in the macaque cerebral cortex in 1969. Gross's work on the ITC and face perception was groundbreaking and helped to establish the field of neuroscience. He was recognized for his contributions with numerous awards and honors, including being named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
