Report for the scientific sojourn carried out at the Darmouth College, from august 2007 until february 2008. It has been very successful, from different viewpoints: scientific, philosophical, human. We have definitely advanced, during the past six months, towards the comprehension of the behaviour of the fluctuations of the quantum vacuum in the presence of boundaries, moving and non-moving, and also in situations where the topology of space-time changes: the dynamical Casimir effect, regularization problems, particle creation statistics, according to different BC, etc. We have solved some longstanding problems and got in this subject quite remarkable results (as we will explain in more detail below). We also pursued a general approach towards a viable modified f(R) gravity in both the Jordan and the Einstein frames (which are known to be mathematically equivalent, but physically not so). A class of exponential, realistic modified gravities has been introduced by us and investigated with care. Special focus was made on step-class models, most promising from the phenomenological viewpoint and which provide a natural way to classify all viable modified gravities. One- and two-steps models were considered, but the analysis is extensible to N-step models. Both inflation in the early universe and the onset of recent accelerated expansion arise in these models in a natural, unified way, what makes them very promising. Moreover, it is monstrated in our work that models in this category easily pass all local tests, including stability of spherical body solution, non-violation of Newton's law, and generation of a very heavy positive mass for the additional scalar degree of freedom.