Curing and preventing the diseases are still the main priorities of medicine, but extending the biological life, enhancing the human capacities, interfacing man and machine, modifying the genome appear to be today objective and realistic goals also, which are susceptible to improve the therapeutic results. Then, the question raised is: are the present goals of medicine still what they should be...

This paper describes the outdoor installation “UNSEEEN”, in the Reford Gardens of Eastern Québec. It emphasizes issues of autonomous self-modifying behavior during its three-month period of continuous operation. The system collected real time data on plants, insects and animals through a multi-camera vision system, interpreted this data, and shared the results with visitors. The system visualiz...

Neurodegenerative diseases are a common late-life scourge for which disease-modifying treatments are sorely needed. Mitochondrial perturbation is commonly observed in these diseases, so pursuing treatment development strategies that target mitochondria or processes affected by mitochondria seems reasonable. This review discusses the rationale underlying past and current efforts to treat neurode...

Objective/purpose Evidence is emerging that human exposure to environmentally ubiquitous perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), used commonly for its household stain repellency characteristics, is associated with immunologic changes. Data from adults near an industrial PFOA disposal site demonstrated a strong negative correlation between blood PFOA concentrations and some immune responses. We propose t...

In this paper we argue that self-modifying code can become a better strategy for realizing long-lived autonomous software systems than static code, regardless how well it was validated and tested. We base our discussion on three facets – self-repairing software, adaptive software and networked systems – for which we point out ongoing and related work before presenting a roadmap towards a contro...

We describe the mechanisms in the Synthesis kernel to compose quajects, kernel objects that encapsulate state and operations. An example using ByteQueue quaject is used to illustrate the composition mechanism. This composition produces quajects with very low overhead, contributing signiicantly to high performance in the Synthesis kernel.

Microorganisms possess a strong capacity for secondary metabolite synthesis, which is represented by tightly controlled networks. The absence of any enzymes leads to change in the original metabolic pathway, with decrease or even elimination synthetic product, not permissible under conditions normal life activities microorganisms. In order improve efficiency metabolism, organisms have evolved m...

The Westminster model has been extremely influential in the shaping of modern democracies, particularly, of course, in democracies that were formerly ruled by Britain. In my recently published book Patterns of Democracy, I analyse the universe of well-established modern democracies, defined as all countries with a population of at least 250,000 that were democratic in the late 1990s and that ha...