Medical school heads are having kittens at the idea that doctors could be churned through their august institutions in four years rather than five.So imagine how they would react to the suggestion that you could learn it all in 24 hours - and without having to get your hands all bloody.

The One Day MD is a brave stab at distilling the experience of medical school - minus those tiresome rag-week escapades - into an easy-to-read, fun guide for the 'everyday layman' who wants to jump-start their way around the wonderful world of doctoring. As you can imagine, the disclaimer section is quite something.

Divided into two halves (presumably offering a lunchbreak in the middle), One Day MD takes you through the basic science - human anatomy, physiology and pathology, a smattering of biochemistry, microbiology and pharmacology - before letting you loose on patients.

Then, from the half-way mark, it's onwards to clinical methods, internal medicine, paediatrics, psychiatry, surgery and so on, until you slump exhausted but educated by module 16 into general practice and primary care. It was ever thus.

Actually, the One Day MD may not churn out many Nobel prize winners, but is not quite the joke it sounds either. The content is a solid and informative if truncated guide to modern medicine - and, as the site suggests, a damn good foundation course for anyone planning to plough through health sites on the web.

That has begun to worry the World Health Organisation. It recently submitted a bid to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers for the right to run a restricted '. health' top-level domain - similar to the already controlled '. gov'and '. edu'web names.

It was turned down after ICANN officials pointed out that WHO hadn't come up with any suggestions about how it would police the domain (or whether such a thing would be desirable).