The rise in the average age and the decrease in the rate of births, cause the phenomenon called population ageing, which rises a number of issues. The oncoming shortage of caregivers and the strong desire of the older adults to live in their own homes originated an increasing interest in Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). AAL encompasses technical systems to support people in their daily routines. ...

Being able to measure time, whether directly or indirectly, is a significant advantage for an organism. It permits it to predict regular events, and prepare for them on time. Thus, clocks are ubiquitous in biology. In the present paper, we consider the most minimal abstract pure clocks and investigate their characteristics with respect to their ability to measure time. Amongst other, we find fu...

As can be seen from the title, this article consists of two distinguishable questions: The first, concerns the possibility of defining entropy, and the second, concerns the applicability of the Second Law. In most cases, writers intertwine the two concepts on entropy and the Second Law 1,2 . In fact, most people define the Second Law as “the law of increasing entropy.” 1-2 This is unfortunately...

To honor Yves Bouligand, champion of new ideas, complexity and living systems, I give a brief overview of our recent discovery of a biaxial Bouligand arceau in achiral tetrahedratic banana liquid crystals. To cite this article: P. Elizabeth Cladis, C. R. Chimie 11 (2008). 2008 Published by Elsevier Masson SAS on behalf of Académie des sciences.

Three samples of francophone subjects from Quebec (Canada) are used to establish the prevalence of parent-child RTP according to different personal, social and family variables, and to verify if children who engage in more RTP with their father exhibit less physical aggression towards other children and are more competitive without resorting to aggression. Our results showed that 24 to 43% of f...

This paper estimates whether female-headed households are poorer than their male-headed counterparts, using household data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) for the year 2005-06. I use poverty measures that reflect on people’s permanent income such as housing condition, wealth index and standard of living index, and argue that these measures could be more informative about the chron...

Thomas C. T. Michaelsa, Lucie X. Liua, Samo Curkc, Peter G. Bolhuisd, Anđela Šarićc and Tuomas P. J. Knowlesa,e aDepartment of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Lensfield Road, Cambridge, CB2 1EW, UK; bPaulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA; cDepartment of Physics and Astronomy, Institute for the Physics of Living Systems, University C...

NASA dedicated over 20 shuttle missions to microgravity research as a primary payload, and many more missions carried microgravity research experiments as secondary payloads. The space agency’s microgravity research strived to increase understanding of the effects of gravity on biological, chemical, and physical systems. Living systems benefited as well. Cells, as they adapted to microgravity, ...

Improving access to affordable modern energy is critical to improving living standards in the developing world. Rural households in India, in particular, are almost entirely reliant on traditional biomass for their basic cooking energy needs. This has adverse effects on their health and productivity, and also causes environmental degradation. This study presents a new generic modelling approach...

In laboratory experiments we demonstrate that protoplasmic tubes of acellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum show current versus voltage profiles consistent with memristive systems. This result complements previous findings on memristive properties of other living systems (human skin and blood and leaves) and contributes to development of self-growing bioelectronic circuits.