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Fjodor Michailovitsch Dostojewskij gilt als einer der bedeutendsten russischen Dichter des letzten Jahrhunderts. Er litt seit seiner Jugend an Epilepsie – einer Krankheit, die auch in seinen Romanen wiederholt zum Motiv wurde. In dieser Arbeit wird das Leben Dostojewskijs aufgezeigt und die verschiedenen an Epilepsie leidenden Protagonisten seiner Romane werden besprochen. Abschliesend werden Dostojewskijs Epilepsie und insbesondere deren Atiologie diskutiert.

Free-space ultraviolet communication exploits atmospheric scattering and absorption to achieve modest data rates with non-line-of-sight transmit-receive geometries. We introduce the ultraviolet communication concept and report on test bed measurements made outdoors in full daylight.

In this paper, we describe confocal optoelectronic holography microscopy (COEHM) technique specifically being developed for characterizing the shape of MEMS and microelectronics. This is particularly important because shape is directly related to the functionality, performance, and integrity of the microstructures of interest. A specific feature of COEHM is that it allows characterization of high aspect ratio MEMS and microelectronics. Representative applications demonstrating the capabilities of COEHM are presented. It is shown that measurement resolution is highly dependent on the numerical aperture (NA) of the optical components comprising COEHM and on the quality of image digitization. By utilizing optical components characterized by a magnification factor of 50x and a NA of 0.45, measurement resolution of 25 nm is achieved. The resolution can be increased to 8 nm when utilizing optical components characterized by a magnification factor of 100x and a NA of 0.73.

In symptomatic epilepsies due to chromosomal aberrations, epileptogenesis may be either the direct consequence of deletion or duplication of a gene causing seizures or may have a more complex etiology caused by the disturbance of the interaction of several genes and environmental factors. We report on a brother and a sister with trisomy 19q13.3→qter who present different epileptologic features and discuss epileptogenesis in this syndrome with respect to genes known to be located on the distal part of chromosome 19q. Both patients share mental retardation and several dysmorphic features. The boy was hypoxic at birth and showed an extremely delayed psychomotor development. The girl, however, had no significant neonatal problems, and her psychomotor development was better. Although the male had an abnormal EEG in childhood, his first partial seizures occurred only as late as at age 31 years. He subsequently became seizure-free with carbamazepine (CBZ). In contrast, the girl already suffered from absence-like seizures during childhood and became seizure-free under ethosuccimide (ESM). A photoparoxysmal response, however, is still visible in her EEG. The difference between the epileptologic features in these siblings points to epileptogenic mechanisms placed far downstream on the way from genotype to phenotype. The photoparoxysmal response—otherwise a facultative finding in genetically determined epilepsies—in the EEG of the sister, however, points to a closer relationship between the duplicated genes and epileptogenesis. The fact that genes encoding potassium channels are located on 19q13.3–q13.4 may also support the latter assumption.