The brain is incredibly complex – so complex that some scientists – including Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist Steven Weinberg, were prompted to wonder whether humans will ever fully grasp how this marvellous organ
When I worked at the New England Medical Center in the 1990s, I was part of a sports medicine clinic that served professional and college athletes, and dancers in the Boston Ballet. Far
Patients who suffer from dementia, of which Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause, are usually looked after by a spouse or partner, with the help perhaps of nearby family members when that’s
Were any disease to be called cruel, Alzheimer’s disease would surely be near the top of the list. It wipes out a lifetime of memories, relationships with long-time partners and friends and toward
If you want to figure out how the brain works, there are several options. One classical method, which served clinical neurologists and neurosurgeons very well in the 19th and 20th centuries, was to
In the springtime of the initial four years we lived in Niagara-on-the-Lake, a female fox with a decided limp in her left leg took up residence in the culvert beneath our driveway. With
Twenty years ago, few people were aware of meditation and fewer still, the term mindfulness. These days, both are practiced by a growing number of Canadians. Recently, for example, a local family health
American President Joe Biden is now 80 years old, and in the next presidential election in November 2024, he will be nearly 82. Four years later, near the end of what could be
Ischemic strokes, those caused by an obstruction in a feeding artery, are more common than hemorrhagic strokes. Small ones, the result of obstructions in small arteries or arterioles, are common enough and most
Forgetting the names of people, where you placed the car keys and the occasional appointment are common much beyond the age of 80. We’re all guilty as charged and most of the time,
The story of the Big Bang we’re familiar with runs something like this: For reasons unknown, and as yet enigmatic, incredibly tiny, dense, quantal energy field inflated in a trillionth, of a trillionth,
Leftovers of last year’s weeds reminded me how much work it takes to control them. So also it is with our minds – too many weedy distractions threaten to distract us, whether emails,
Entropy is hardly a household word. It certainly wasn’t one I knew much about until 2020, when I began to develop the library series, “Physics: The Camelot Period 1900-1930.” As a prologue for
In the late 1940s and early ’50s, where I grew up, baseball was our favourite game, not so much at school but in makeup games on diamonds in nearby Gibbons Park or a
On a recent Sunday following the 8:30 a.m. service at St. Mark’s, I visited my wife Jan at Pleasant Manor Radiant Care in Virgil. After the usual COVID test, I passed Jan’s room
The first of our cousin species, the Neanderthals, were discovered in the Neander Valley in Germany in 1856, three years before Charles Darwin published his revolutionary book, “On the Origins of Species.” Neanderthals
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When I was a boy growing up in London, Ont., life was framed by the few blocks surrounding my home on Oxford Street, the nearby Thames River, and the adjacent bushy forested areas
The nature of the consciousness and awareness remain what Winston Churchill so aptly described in a very different context, a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” But as mysterious as both
One of the most common benign brain tumours involves the vestibular nerve. During my training and early practice years, these were major challenges for neurosurgeons because there were no CT and MRI scans,
One of the defining moments in the Gene Rodenberry’s “Star Trek” series, “The Next Generation,” was the episode when Data, the sole robotic member of the crew on the Enterprise was put on
I am fascinated by footprints left behind by our prehuman and modern ancestors. Those tracks stir the imagination in ways that bones, including the skull, do not — at least for me. One
Neanderthals lived between 30,000 and 400,000 years ago and then, throughout their wide Eurasian range, disappeared for mysterious reasons. Genetic studies suggest they probably lived in small, widely scattered groups. That mode of
We take for granted our extraordinary ability to get about on two legs. Whether walking, running, dancing, skiing or skating, we do it all, depending on our age, without much thought. Bipedalism for
Statistics suggest as many as 300,000 Americans and Canadians suffer from a sudden cardiac arrest out of hospital and roughly half can be resuscitated with reasonable recovery and little or no loss of
Several decades ago, long before there was any sense of urgency and angst about burning fossil fuels and climate change, scientists began to explore the feasibility of harnessing the way the sun fuses
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