Matt Evans

© 2015 Elsevier Inc.The beneficial effects of physical activity are well documented, yet the mechanisms by which PA prevents disease and improves health outcomes are poorly understood. To identify major gaps in knowledge and potential strategies for catalyzing progress in the field, the NIH convened a workshop in late October 2014 entitled "Understanding the Cellular and Molecular Mechanisms of Physical Activity-Induced Health Benefits." Presentations and discussions emphasized the challenges imposed by the integrative and intermittent nature of PA, the tremendous discovery potential of applying "-omics" technologies to understand interorgan crosstalk and biological networking systems during PA, and the need to establish an infrastructure of clinical trial sites with sufficient expertise to incorporate mechanistic outcome measures into adequately sized human PA trials. Identification of the mechanisms that underlie the link between PA and improved health holds extraordinary promise for discovery of novel therapeutic targets and development of personalized exercise medicine.

Over the past few decades there has been a rebellion brewing in the world of Parmenides scholarship. Most of the things you probably think you know about the man have come under serious and sustained attack. No longer is it safe to accept on trust the view—which G. E. L. Owen so forcefully defended in his 1960 paper “Eleatic Questions”—that according to Parmenides there exists only one thing, ungenerated, indestructible, unchanging, indivisible, and spherical. Nor is it safe to assume that he had no real commitment to empirical theorizing, and sought only to demolish the cosmological tradition that was initiated and developed by his Ionian predecessors Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. All of..