Practising Less is More: An Exploration of What it Means to See "This Patient" Not a "Patient Like This".

In the last decade literature focused on a "less is more" approach has been primarily represented by clinical cases describing the excesses of an aggressive, redundant, non-personalized, and non-respectful medicine. Most of these articles focus on a "more is worse" approach and centre around the downstream negative consequences of medical overuse. Having identified a gap in the literature on the experience and practice of less, rather than the harms of excess, we carried out an exploratory qualitative study into how a "less is more" approach works in practice.

Cellular senescence, rejuvenation and potential immortality.

Ageing, death, and potential immortality lie at the heart of biology, but two seemingly incompatible paradigms coexist in different research communities and have done since the nineteenth century. The universal senescence paradigm sees senescence as inevitable in all cells. Damage accumulates.

The production of auxin by dying cells.

In this review, I discuss the possibility that dying cells produce much of the auxin in vascular plants. The natural auxin, indole-3-acetic acid (IAA), is derived from tryptophan by a two-step pathway via indole pyruvic acid. The first enzymes in the pathway, tryptophan aminotransferases, have a low affinity for tryptophan and break it down only when tryptophan levels rise far above normal intracellular concentrations.

The Assessment of Landscape Expressivity: A Free Choice Profiling Approach.

In this paper we explore a relational understanding of landscape qualities. We asked three independent groups of human observers to assess the expressive qualities of a range of landscapes in the UK and in Spain, either by means of personal visits or from a projected digital image. We employed a Free Choice Profiling (FCP) methodology, in which observers generated their own descriptive terminologies and then used these to quantify perceived landscape qualities on visual analogue scales.

Whole transcriptome organisation in the dehydrated supraoptic nucleus.

The supraoptic nucleus (SON) is part of the central osmotic circuitry that synthesises the hormone vasopressin (Avp) and transports it to terminals in the posterior lobe of the pituitary. Following osmotic stress such as dehydration, this tissue undergoes morphological, electrical and transcriptional changes to facilitate the appropriate regulation and release of Avp into the circulation where it conserves water at the level of the kidney. Here, the organisation of the whole transcriptome following dehydration is modelled to fit Zipf's law, a natural power law that holds true for all natural languages, that states if the frequency of word usage is plotted against its rank, then the log linear regression of this is -1.

A cellular oscillator model for periodic pattern formation.

In this paper, we present a model for pattern formation in developing organisms that is based on cellular oscillators (CO). An oscillatory process within cells serves as a developmental clock whose period is tightly regulated by cell autonomous or non-autonomous mechanisms. A spatial pattern is generated as a result of an initial temporal ordering of the cell oscillators freezing into spatial order as the clocks slow down and stop at different times or phases in their cycles.

The life of form. Emergent patterns of morphological transformation.

The problem of biological form remains unresolved despite the known details of gene activities in embryonic development. Segmentation is discussed in connection with observed gene activities and the question of generic regularities across phyla. The sciences of complexity and nonlinear dynamics are considered as contexts for the exploration of constraints at both the level of genetic networks and morphogenesis.

Temporal organization and disorganization in organisms.

The study of biological rhythms has always been a highly interdisciplinary field of research, one that is constantly breaking new ground. Developments during the past 10 years are transforming our ideas about the dynamics of physiological regulation in two ways: (i) homeostasis is really homeodynamics, with sophisticated but robust patterns of hierarchically nested rhythms covering several orders of magnitude in the frequency domain; (ii) there is much more irregularity than previously believed in processes as basic as the heart rate, suggesting either a chaotic generator, a complex pattern of interacting systems with different frequencies, or possibly both. This behavior is consistent with that expected of organisms as complex adaptive systems.

Exploiter-mediated coexistence and frequency-dependent selection in a numerical model of biodiversity.

The key feature of the Daisyworld approach is to explicitly model feedbacks between the competitive dynamics of a planetary biota (daisies with different albedos) and the planet's climate, namely its surface temperature. Self-regulation of surface temperature and stable population dynamics are striking emergent properties of this system, despite increasing energy output from the model's sun. In this paper we attempt to perturb Daisyworld by introducing herbivores endowed with one of four strategies for feeding on daisies in a system rich in daisy diversity, and find that the herbivores only moderately diminish the temperature regulating abilities of the system.