Hydrotherapy (Project Hydriades)

Natural resources are being used for the maintenance of health. According to the Law 3498/2006 of the Greek Parliament the natural health spas must be validated for their therapeutic properties. The Association of Municipalities and Communities of Health Springs of Greece signed a contract with the Research Committee of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in order to conduct the research programme: ‘Study for the documentation of the therapeutic properties of the thermomineral waters’. The main aim of the project is: (1) the study of biological and therapeutic parameters of the natural health sources, (2) the identification of the indications and contraindications of hydrotherapy. Aims parallel to the main ones have been also set

QoS experiences in native IPv6 GRNET and 6NET networks

Adoption of IPv6 technology has been accelerated in the last few years but there is limited experience in the deployment of Quality of Service (QoS) for IPv6 traffic in backbone networks. As available software and hardware is designed to handle IPv4 packets, there is a need to accurately measure the performance of QoS mechanisms in an IPv6 environment. This paper discusses tests in the deployment of IPv6 QoS in core networks, namely the production dual stack GRNET and the IPv6-only 6NET networks, using both hardware and software platforms. In either case, we succeeded in delivering advanced transport services to IPv6 traffic and provided different performance guarantees to portions of traffic. The deployed QoS schema was common for IPv6 and IPv4; in most cases both v4 and v6 traffic exhibited comparable performance per class while imposing no significantly different overhead on network elements. A major conclusion of our tests is that the IPv6 QoS mechanisms are efficiently supported with state-of-the-art router cards at gigabit speeds. I

A workbench for computational analysis of protein sequence and structure on the Internet

National audienceComputational analysis of protein sequences with statistical models, machine learning techniques or empirical rules leads to prediction of structural and functional features of the corresponding molecules. Taking into account the recent explosion of biological information in terms of complete genome sequences the use of computational tools of analysis is considered essential. Individual tools are available through the Internet, and their performance depends on their liability and simplicity of use. We present a workspace that establishes data trafficking towards a collection of tools (developed also by our team), communication between them and simple representation of the results of sequence and structure analysis. At the sequence level, the following are now offered: Analysis of periodical features, structural classification with neural networks, prediction of secondary structure, prediction and topology of transmembrane regions and multiple sequence alignment. At the structure level, the creation and representation of protein structures and three-dimensional fit is possible. The end-user is offered with a user-friendly interface and a simple representation of the results. The system's open and decentralized design permits the addition of new individual modules that may reside anywhere on the Internet. Our future plans include the development of modules for fold recognition, receptor prediction and sequence complexity analysis. Interconnection between the system, the individual tools and the user is established through the HTTP protocol, the only requirement for its usage being Internet access