Epictetus: Destiny, Logos and Happiness According to the stoic conception, the human being is capable, not only of recognizing the divine world order through reason, but also aligning their acts to it. For stoics, it is good to live in conformity with destiny or nature, through which the world order can be seen. Therefore the wise man must learn to control his emotions in a detached way, in order to face the irreversibility of his destiny like illness and death. This approach and its term of stoic calm has been used until today as a relevant moral ideal through many Western ethical theories and studies. There are things in our power and others which we can not control. In our power are things like opinions, instincts and aversion, simply put: everything which is our own work. On the contrary, there are things beyond our power like our body, possesions, prestige and social position, shortly: everything which is not our own work. What in our authority resides, can be prevented by nature. Contrarily, what in our authority doesn't reside, is unfree, alien and hindered. Keep these words in mind: When you take alien and unfree things by nature as free and familiar things, you will suffer from grief, restrain and anxiety. And because of that, you will be unhappy with God and other people. But if you see your own work as your creation, and alien things as something strange and unnatural, nobody will never stop and force you to do things. You won't be unhappy with anybody, work against your will, damage yourself nor have an enemy. You will see how nothing will cause harm to you.

THE SUN AS GOODNESS AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF EVIL The sun allows all visible things to flourish without becoming part of it. What does this statement mean? According to Plato the real nature of the existence is Eidos, viz. Idea while the material world is the latest and poorest expression of being. The universe is plenty of ideas, each of one is unique, eternal, unalterable and complete. All of them are made of spirit. As a result we can't accept the possibility of evil. The concept of evil means not only a bad and violent behaviour aiming to destroy life in general but also corruption, decay and finally death. This general understanding of evil contradicts the platonic universe and therefore Platon rejects evil as an idea within the world of ideas. First, ideas are eternal. Assuming that evil exists means also that ideas could decay. Secondly the meaning of evil could imply that ideas participate in nature which is inconsistent with his theory of archetypes. According to Plato although nature can participate in the world of ideas, these are completely independent of nature because in the end all living beings and physical things are just a copy, a reflexion of the reality made of ideas. To me, reality is decided in degrees and the physical world as humans know, would be the lowest level of reality. Does evil exist at all? According to Plato, evil has no reality. What we understand as evil, ist just lack of good, the poorest and lowest level of reality. Such a thing would be evil. Therefore the idea of good is key to understand the link between knowledge and moral, but especially, to understand why human beings behave badly. Nowadays this relationship seems disconnected. Knowledge ist related to objects, numbers and Physics while the idea of good is part of moral and social studies. To Platon is the contemplation of ideas, especially the idea of good fundamental not only to know well but also to behave properly. Without this idea of good humans beings can be manipulated, misleaded and prompted to do wrong.

Silencing Genes to Fight Cancer (Part I) A relatively new experimental possibility of gene shutdown has been stablished and recently developed in bioscience to cure diseases. For this discovery two scientists, Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Melo received the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 2006. The RNA interference or RNA-silencing is a natural defence mechanism in a wide range of living beings like mushrooms, plants and animals. These organisms are provided with nucleus cells, which content the genetic material. The RNAi is based on an interaction of short pieces of RNA with the genotype involving the activity of several enzymes. As a result the RNA will split in some fragments and consequently the transferred information will be destroyed or rather the transmision in a protein will be blocked reducing a determined gen expression. This mechanism also plays an important role in plants when they intercept extrinsic RNA virus as a result of an infection. At the same time numeorus virus try to inhibit a host defence response turning off the defence mechanism in order to not be identified.

The Last Guards of La Estrella Sinforosa Sancho and Juan Martín Colomer are an octogenarian married couple, who are the only inhabitants for more than 30 years in a small village called La Estrella.This small town is located in the eastern highlands of Teruel, in the northeastern region of Aragon where once live more than 200 people. The village lies embedded in a deep valley. Pollen flies over pine trees which have been spread gradually over the old cultivated land. "We have always lived like that. When it's cold, we set a fire and sleep under blankets. We have chickens, rabbits, land and you learn to live on it." She said. On the picture they both get the food ready, set a fire in the chimney and roast it. The village is in the middle of decline population. There are less than 8 inhabitants per square kilometer. Those who remain, are growing older / ageing. A drastic example from a society where the deaths in Spain exceed the number of births. "They all have left. Those who decided to stay, are idiots." She said, walking through the empty houses of a ghost town. If you're interested in learning more about, you can take a closer look at the article below: Susana Vera: Los últimos centinelas de la Estrella, El País, 25 Julio 2018

I. Kant: Cognitive Capacity As a World Structure The empiricism came to the conclusion that the belief that sensory data present the world "as it is" is a tenuous supposition at best. This can be illustrated through the following questions: 1) When I see a brown colour, touch a smooth surface and hear a muffled noise and knock on it with my fingers, these perceptions don't necessarily evoke the concept of a "table". If sense data are the only information coming from the outside world, how does the idea of "things" come into being in our consciousness? 2) Even if we agree with the idea that perceiving things is possible, such perceptions are always subjective. In other words, my perception of so-called "reality" is constrained both by senses and by ability to process information. Supposing I'm blind or deaf, so I can sense some particular aspects of "reality" while ignoring others. Because of that I can sense the world in a different way. So what might lead to us to a conviction that we all see the same table? 3) Can we believe we are living together in the same world or are there as many worlds as people?