Sacred Companions

Sacred Space

A space can be sacred, providing those who inhabit a particular space with sense of transcendence-being connected to something greater than oneself. The sacredness may be inherent in the space, as for a religious institution or a serene place outdoors. Alternatively, a space may be made sacred by the people within it and events that occur there. As medical providers, we have the opportunity to ...

Lifelong companions

The life of an RNA molecule is complicated. Once a newly synthesized eukaryotic RNA has emerged from the RNA polymerase in the nucleus, it will be processed, spliced, and exported into cytoplasm. In prokaryotes, transcribed RNA is synthesized directly in the cytoplasm. RNA molecules that serve as mRNAs have to be kept devoid of local structures that are inhibitory for ribosome scanning and tran...

Artificial Companions

The paper concerns the closely related topics of the possibility of machines having identifiable personalities, and the possible future legal responsibilities of machines. As will become clear, I wish to explore these topics in terms which are basically those of computational linguistics; and by ‘machines’ here, I intend software entities, rather than robots, and in particular the sort of softw...

Is Anything Sacred Anymore?

Eugenics--sacred and profane.

t begins innocuously enough. A six-month-old baby, once thriving and cheerful, begins reacting differently to normal sounds such as clapping hands or closing doors. Her parents ice that her limbs twitch and her muscles are not developing properly. She has trouble swallowing and shows signs of mental retardation. What they can’t see is her compromised brain tissue, which began degenerating when ...