Opium, Experimentation, and Alterity in France

The effects and dangers of opium were subject to intense scientific scrutiny and experimentation in Paris in the decades around 1700, as rival networks of healers contended for commercial advantage over the compound drugs that contained it. Opium, widely consumed in the Ottoman empire, became a subject of European scientific interest in an attempt to render it safe, agreeable, and beneficial for European bodies. Apothecaries sought to resurrect an ancient drug and infuse it with new life in the laboratory; physicians conducted chemical experiments upon it. Yet it was hard to reach agreement as to opium's harmful or beneficial effects; some aspects of its nature proved impossible to ‘domesticate’ in the same way as other exotic drugs like coffee or tea, or even cinchona. I argue that only by investigating the discrete networks which sold and experimented upon opium can the historian account for the ways in which this drug generated social, political, and financial capital for experimenters as it circulated throughout society.

The multifaceted nature of impulsivity in Parkinson’s disease

This scientific commentary refers to ‘The structural connectivity of discrete networks underlies impulsivity and gambling in Parkinson’s disease’, by Mosley et al. (doi:10.1093/brain/awz327).

The structural connectivity of discrete networks underlies impulsivity and gambling in Parkinson’s disease

See O’Callaghan (doi:10.1093/brain/awz349) for a scientific commentary on this article. Mosley et al. examine impulsivity and naturalistic gambling behaviours in patients with Parkinson’s disease. They link within-patient differences to the structural connectivity of networks subserving reward evaluation and response inhibition, and reveal pivotal roles for the ventral striatum and subthalamic nucleus within these networks.

Relative contributions of chain density and topology to the elasticity of two-dimensional polymer networks

Discrete networks simulations are conducted to decorrelate the effects of density and topology on the elasticity of near-ideal random networks.