Binocular Eye Movements Are Adapted to the Natural Environment.

Humans and many animals make frequent saccades requiring coordinated movements of the eyes. When landing on the new fixation point, the eyes must converge accurately or double images will be perceived. We asked whether the visual system uses statistical regularities in the natural environment to aid eye alignment at the end of saccades. We measured the distribution of naturally occurring disparities in different parts of the visual field. The central tendency of the distributions was crossed (nearer than fixation) in the lower field and uncrossed (farther) in the upper field in male and female participants. It was uncrossed in the left and right fields. We also measured horizontal vergence after completion of vertical, horizontal, and oblique saccades. When the eyes first landed near the eccentric target, vergence was quite consistent with the natural-disparity distribution. For example, when making an upward saccade, the eyes diverged to be aligned with the most probable uncrossed disparity in that part of the visual field. Likewise, when making a downward saccade, the eyes converged to enable alignment with crossed disparity in that part of the field. Our results show that rapid binocular eye movements are adapted to the statistics of the 3D environment, minimizing the need for large corrective vergence movements at the end of saccades. The results are relevant to the debate about whether eye movements are derived from separate saccadic and vergence neural commands that control both eyes or from separate monocular commands that control the eyes independently.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT We show that the human visual system incorporates statistical regularities in the visual environment to enable efficient binocular eye movements. We define the oculomotor horopter: the surface of 3D positions to which the eyes initially move when stimulated by eccentric targets. The observed movements maximize the probability of accurate fixation as the eyes move from one position to another. This is the first study to show quantitatively that binocular eye movements conform to 3D scene statistics, thereby enabling efficient processing. The results provide greater insight into the neural mechanisms underlying the planning and execution of saccadic eye movements

Shocks and Frictions under Right-to-Manage Wage Bargaining: A Transatlantic Perspective

Business Cycles, Labor Market Search, Wage Bargaining, Inflation

Flow curvature effects on dynamic behaviour of a novel vertical axis tidal current turbine: numerical and experimental analysis

The paper deals with performances analysis of vertical axis turbine to exploit tidal marine currents. Flow curvature effects on performences of a novel vertical axis turbine have been investuigated. It has been shown that the flow curvature effect allows to design properly an accurate airfoil shape to increase turbine performances

Shocks and frictions under right-to-manage wage bargaining: a transatlantic perspective

This paper introduces staggered right-to-manage wage bargaining into a New Keynesian business cycle model. Our key result is that the model is able to generate persistent responses in output, inflation, and total labor input to both neutral technology and monetary policy shocks. Furthermore, we compare the model’s dynamic behavior when calibrated to the US and to an European economy. We find that the degree of price rigidity explains most of the differences in response to a monetary policy shock. When the economy is hit by a neutral technology shock, both price and wage rigidities turn out to be important

Degeneracy Between the Regge Slope of Mesons and Baryons from Supersymmetry

We consider the degeneracy between the Regge slope of mesons and baryons in QCD. We argue that within the "orientifold large-N approximation" asymptotically massive mesons and baryons become supersymmetric partners and hence degenerate. To this end, we generalize QCD by a SU(N) theory with a quark in the two-index antisymmetric representation. We show that in this framework the meson is represented by an oriented bosonic QCD-string and the baryon is represented by an un-oriented fermionic QCD-string. At large-N, due to an equivalence with super Yang-Mills, the tensions of the bosonic and the fermionic strings coincide. Our description of mesons and baryons as oriented and un-oriented bosonic and fermionic QCD-strings is in full agreement with the spectra of open strings in the dual type 0' string theory.Comment: v2: extended version. Appendices and references adde

A precise determination of the psibar-psi anomalous dimension in conformal gauge theories

A strategy for computing the psibar-psi anomalous dimension at the fixed point in infrared-conformal gauge theories from lattice simulations is discussed. The method is based on the scaling of the spectral density of the Dirac operator or rather its integral, the mode number. It is relatively cheap, mainly for two reasons: (a) the mode number can be determined with quite high accuracy, (b) the psibar-psi anomalous dimension is extracted from a fit of several observables on the same set of configurations (no scaling in the Lagrangian parameters is needed). As an example the psibar-psi anomalous dimension has been computed in the SU(2) theory with 2 Dirac fermions in the adjoint representation of the gauge group, and has been found to be 0.371(20). In this particular case, the proposed strategy has proved to be very robust and effective.Comment: LaTeX, 16 pages, 3 PDF figures, [v3] minor cosmetic change

Smart biosensors for multiplexed and fully integrated point-of-care diagnostics

Point-of-care diagnostics (PoC) and personalised medicine are highly valuable for the improvement of world health. Smartphone PoC platforms which precisely diagnose diseases and track their development through the detection of several bioanalytes represent one of the newest and most exciting advancements towards mass-screening applications. Here we focus on recent advances in both multiplexed and smartphone integrated PoC sensors

The DarkSide awakens

The DarkSide program at LNGS aims to perform background-free WIMP searches using two phase liquid argon time projection chambers, with the ultimate goal of covering all parameters down to the socalled neutrino floor. One of the distinct features of the program is the use of underground argon with has a reduced content of the radioactive 39Ar compared to atmospheric argon. The DarkSide Collaboration is currently operating the DarkSide-50 experiment, the first such WIMP detector using underground argo

The DarkSide-50 outer detectors

DarkSide-50 is a dark matter detection experiment searching for Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs), in Gran Sasso National Laboratory. For experiments like DarkSide-50, neutrons are one of the primary backgrounds that can mimic WIMP signal

Oncoplastic conservative surgery for breast cancer: long-term outcomes of our first ten years experience

The main goal of oncoplastic breast surgery (OBS) is to optimize cosmetic outcomes and reduce patient morbidity, while still providing an oncologically-safe surgical outcome and extending the target population of conservative surgery. Although the growing number of reported experiences with oncoplastic surgery, few studies account for the long-term outcomes