The first lecture on kidney transplant was about perfusion during my conference today. Perfusion – the imperfect art and science of keeping an organ alive after it has been removed from a human body – is striving for vitality of an organ without blood and oxygen supply. The technique isn’t perfect, but hopefully can buy time for the transplant team to find the matched organ transplant recipients. For patients, they can recover quicker with better quality of the kidney organ. For surgeons, they can get some sleep after the first organ

Being invited to give talks in scientific meeting in Australia is an honour. The only two reasons to accept the invitation – and they’re good ones – are intellectual exchange and chance to visit Adelaide.

Even though there isn’t direct flight into Adelaide Airport, travel to Adelaide is easy. I slept through the journey soon after watching one documentary by David Attenborough on the plane. By the time of landing, I realised my missing the meals.

That didn’t matter. I was happy enough to have arrived

Not all stories are epic. They can be as simple as a mother-daughter story like A Thousand Splendid Suns , that takes place in Afghan society. Or else, a story about three generations of Palestinian women, as what I have read in Etaf Rum's novel A Woman is No Man .

The title of the novel, by itself, is telling a good story.

And yes, that would be an immediate answer to any Palestine girl who asks why she can't do so-and-so

English is often called a "mixed" or even a "mongrel" language; the words come from a true hybrid of Saxon, Celtic, Latin, French, Norse and Greek.

My recent reading turned out to be an intricate mix of Greek heritage or mythology. That's a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with the mysterious title Middlesex .

The truly classic style of writing, paradoxical as it may seem, is the narrator voice of Cal telling the story of grandparents since 1922, all the way

Picture a northwestern crow soaring to great heights, scanning coastal British Columbia for his breakfast treats. The crow loves Japanese littleneck clams the most. Once the crow locates the target molluscs, it picks up speed to dive-bomb at the mudflats and dig the clams out of the sticky ooze with their beaks.

The next code to crack is opening the shell without clam opener and forks. That's how the crow does. Shortly after flying with the heavy shells, the crow drops the clams on the nearby rocks.

If you could sit down and have dinner with anyone, who would it be?

If Mark Twain happened to be asked this question, his answer is most likely to be Percival Everett. Or vice versa.

Percival Everett is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. I have enjoyed his new novel James , in which he re-invented Mark Twain's novel along the Mississippi River. You will never look at The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the same way again after reading James . The latter

Improbable as it would have seemed to almost all biologists and animal behaviourists, a young king penguin named Ursula ventured into the open Atlantic Ocean in 2007 and launched a three-month journey toward an area off Antarctica. Statistically, one out of three would have died in the predator-dense danger zone where Ursula took the leap.

I heard the story of Ursula on the first page of the book Wildhood co-authored by an evolutionary biologist and a science journalist.

Ursula's story is legendary. Picture

Summer time medical shadowing is one way for high school students to venture in the area of practicing doctors. This gives students a better idea what the career of a medical doctor is like.

After a busy clinic with high school students sitting next to me today, I had a far less hard-pressed dinner time with them. We started off talking about dermatology specialty. And then the conversation moved on and they asked me about if and how artificial intelligence is going to eventually phase out the medical doctors.

I don'