To surmount the notorious difficulties of defining life, we should evaluate theories of life not by whether they provide necessary and sufficient conditions for our current preconceptions about life but by how well they explain living phenomena and how satisfactorily they resolve puzzles about life. On these grounds, the theory of life as supple adaptation gets support from the natural and comp...

Although many older adults wish to live independently, remaining in their own homes as long as possible, they may face obstacles such as transportation issues, social isolation, upkeep of the home, and increasing inhome care costs, which prevent them from doing so. The use of technology within the home, through technology-based assisted living systems, has the potential to alleviate some of the...

The law of temporal hierarchies of the biological world allows us to pick out of the biomass quasiclosed thermodynamic systems of a specific hierarchy. The use of this law of Nature as applied to supramolecular structures of organisms allows us the opportunity of using the methods of equilibrium supramolecular thermodynamics in the examination of open living systems. It has been proven that the...

The new view of reality was by no means easy to accept for physicists at the beginning of the century. Exploration of the atomic and subatomic world brought them in contact with a strange and unexpected reality. In their struggle to grasp this new reality, scientists became painfully aware that their basic concepts, their language, and their whole way of thinking were inadequate to describe ato...

Living systems are structure determined systems. Teaching is never feasible, but learning is inevitable, a comment by an observer about some aspect of the constant changes occurring while life goes on. Teachers are all those who open up spaces for conviviality and allow congruent changes to take place. T h e re are no instructive interactions in nature . Health and the biology of living systems...

The growing number of older people emerges the need to consider autonomy concerns for those people and their need for intensive care. Plenty of researches, such as those in the domain of Ambient Assisted Living Systems, have been carried out to create enhanced conditions for older and people with disabilities, based on providing ICT solutions that enhance the well-being of elderly people and pr...

Rather than studying existent living systems, we can increasingly produce computer models that capture the salient aspects of life. This provides us with unprecedented opportunities to examine, manipulate, and explore biological phenomena, allowing us to investigate some of the deepest issues in biology.

The downscaling of geostationary diurnal thermal data can ease the lack of land surface temperature (LST) datasets that combine high spatial and temporal resolution. However, the downscaling of diurnal LST data is more demanding than single scenes. This is because the spatiotemporal interrelationships of the original LST data have to be preserved and accurately reproduced by the downscaled LST ...

An understanding of the evolutionary mechanisms that lead to increased genome capabilities is essential for determining the potentials and limits of living systems. We evolve abstract aesthetic imagery on the basis of an image connectivity trait that has a theoretically determined maximum value. This trait can be influenced by “development” genes. We investigate simulated evolution when the dev...

The VIIRS Land Surface Temperature (LST) Environmental Data Record (EDR) has reached validated (V1 stage) maturity in December 2014. This study compares VIIRS v1 LST with the ground in situ observations and with heritage LST product from MODIS Aqua and AATSR. Comparisons against U.S. SURFRAD ground observations indicate a similar accuracy among VIIRS, MODIS and AATSR LST, in which VIIRS LST pre...