Since the first report of clonidine, an alpha2-adrenoceptor agonist, the indications for this class of drugs have continued to expand. In December 1999, dexmedetomidine was approved as the most recent agent in this group and was introduced into clinical practice as a short-term sedative (<24 hours). Alpha2-adrenoceptor agonists have several beneficial actions during the perioperative period. They decrease sympathetic tone, with attenuation of the neuroendocrine and hemodynamic responses to anesthesia and surgery; reduce anesthetic and opioid requirements; and cause sedation and analgesia. They allow psychomotoric function to be preserved while letting the patient rest comfortably. With this combination of effects, alpha2-adrenoceptor agonists may offer benefits in the prophylaxis and adjuvant treatment of perioperative myocardial ischemia. Furthermore, their role in pain management and regional anesthesia is expanding. Side effects consist of mild to moderate cardiovascular depression, with slight decreases in blood pressure and heart rate. The development of new, more selective alpha2-adrenoceptor agonists with improved side effect profiles may provide a new concept for the administration of perioperative anesthesia and analgesia. This review aims to give background information to improve understanding of the properties and applications of the novel alpha2-adrenoceptor agonist, dexmedetomidine.

Reperfusion after a brief period of ischemia caused induction of myocardial C/EBP (beta-subunit). The rapid and sustained production of IL-6 with concomitant expression of IL-6 receptor and gp130 suggest that these factors may participate in a local inflammatory cascade after myocardial ischemia and reperfusion.

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Three experiments were conducted extending research on chess and Go to the game of Othello. Experiment 1 demonstrated that expert Othello players, in comparison to nonplayers of the game, are superior at recalling meaningful game configurations but are not better at recalling random positions. Experiment 2 demonstrated that expert players can learn a sequence of moves from an Othello game much more rapidly than nonplayers can. Experiment 3 examined chunking behavior and found that experts and nonplayers perceive different patterns of piece clusters in an Othello position. These results indicate that skill in Othello is cognitively organized in a manner similar to chess skill. Because Othello provides a less complex environment than chess and Go, efforts to model human skill in strategy games may be profitably pursued with Othello.

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One of the brightest of the Third Programme's recent efforts was the presentation of a little festival of Pfitzner's music. “Little,” perhaps, may be not quite the right word for however short a series of programmes which included the whole of Palestrina (1912–1915), but it must be remembered that Pfitzner wrote four other operas besides this celebrated chef-d'oeuvre—Der arme Heinrich (1891–93), Die Rose vom Liebesgarten (1897–1900), Das Christelflein (1906, revised 1917), and Das Herz (1930–31). The B.B.C. gave us no glimpse of these other operas, although round about Christmas of each year one of their regional orchestras undertakes the overture to Das Christelflein as an appropriately seasonal piece. For this festival occasion, the B.B.C, in addition to Palestrina, threw in a song recital and a performance of Pfitzner's last chamber work, the Sextet (Op. 55/1945) for piano, violin, viola, cello, double-bass and clarinet. These two latter items may have been well-intentioned choices, but, notwithstanding, they were extremely ill chosen. The Third Programme—as, alas, so often—was either wrongly advised, or simply did not have any (skilled) advice to call upon. For instance, the six songs, ably performed by Mary Jarred, belonged to Pfitzner's earliest period—the latest “Lied”" was Sonst (Op. 15, no. 4), composed in 1904, and most of the other songs were written in the 1880's or 90's. But Pfitzner's output of “Lieder” extends to the 1930's and up to Op. 41—and his maturest and best songs are to be found in the years which the B.B.C. did not remotely approach! Incidentally, no opus numbers were printed in the Radio Times or announced over the air, so that as far as the uninformed listener was concerned he was hearing a “representative” selection of Pfitzner's “Lieder”; in fact, of course, he was hearing nothing of the kind.

The obsession with the Millenium was doubtless inevitable. It is certainly inescapable. None of us can avoid introducing catch phrases like ‘the new century that awaits us’ or ‘as we move into the new century’ into what we write or speak: we've been conditioned so to do. It is tempting of course to take stock from time to time and reassess how reputations stand, of individuals, of institutions, of movements in the arts. I have lived long enough myself to have witnessed the post-war ascendance of Modernism and the more recent arrival on the scene of Post-Modernism. More specifically, Mahler has been brought in out of the cold and enjoyed a triumph, the global scale of which, even at my most incautiously optimistic, I could never have predicted; and sure enough there are today stirrings here and there, of what my old friend Hans Keller might have spelled out as ‘resistances’ to Mahler's music, couched in terms that risibly arouse memories of the stone-age (stone-deaf) opinions of Eric Blom or Frank Howes, not to speak of Vaughan Williams's immortal judgment: ‘… Intimate acquaintance with the executive side of music made even [sic] Mahler a very tolerable imitation of a composer’.