14,534 research outputs found
Collective rearrangement at the onset of flow of a polycrystalline hexagonal columnar phase
Creep experiments on polycrystalline surfactant hexagonal columnar phases
show a power law regime, followed by a drastic fluidization before reaching a
final stationary flow. The scaling of the fluidization time with the shear
modulus of the sample and stress applied suggests that the onset of flow
involves a bulk reorganization of the material. This is confirmed by X-ray
scattering under stress coupled to \textit{in situ} rheology experiments, which
show a collective reorientation of all crystallites at the onset of flow. The
analogy with the fracture of heterogeneous materials is discussed.Comment: to appear in Phys. Rev. Let
Visuospatial tasks suppress craving for cigarettes.
The Elaborated Intrusion (EI) theory of desire posits that visual imagery plays a key role in craving. We report a series of experiments testing this hypothesis in a drug addiction context. Experiment 1 showed that a mental visual imagery task with neutral content reduced cigarette craving in abstaining smokers, but that an equivalent auditory task did not. The effect of visual imagery was replicated in Experiment 2, which also showed comparable effects of non-imagery visual working memory interference. Experiment 3 showed that the benefit of visual over auditory interference was not dependent upon imagery being used to induce craving. Experiment 4 compared a visuomotor task, making shapes from modeling clay, with a verbal task (counting back from 100), and again showed a benefit of the visual over the non-visual task. We conclude that visual imagery supports craving for cigarettes. Competing imagery or visual working memory tasks may help tackle craving in smokers trying to quit
Application of compressed sensing to the simulation of atomic systems
Compressed sensing is a method that allows a significant reduction in the
number of samples required for accurate measurements in many applications in
experimental sciences and engineering. In this work, we show that compressed
sensing can also be used to speed up numerical simulations. We apply compressed
sensing to extract information from the real-time simulation of atomic and
molecular systems, including electronic and nuclear dynamics. We find that for
the calculation of vibrational and optical spectra the total propagation time,
and hence the computational cost, can be reduced by approximately a factor of
five.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure
Implicit cognition is impaired and dissociable in a head-injured group with executive deficits
Implicit or non-conscious cognition is traditionally assumed to be robust to pathology but Gomez-Beldarrain et al (1999, 2002) recently showed deficits on a single implicit task after head injury. Laboratory research suggests that implicit processes dissociate. This study therefore examined implicit cognition in 20 head-injured patients and age- and I.Q.-matched controls using a battery of four implicit cognition tasks: a Serial Reaction Time task (SRT), mere exposure effect task, automatic stereotype activation and hidden co-variation detection. Patients were assessed on an extensive neuropsychological battery, and MRI scanned. Inclusion criteria included impairment on at least one measure of executive function. The patient group was impaired relative to the control group on all the implicit cognition tasks except automatic stereotype activation. Effect size analyses using the control mean and standard deviation for reference showed further dissociations across patients and across implicit tasks. Patients impaired on implicit tasks had more cognitive deficits overall than those unimpaired, and a larger Dysexecutive Self/Other discrepancy (DEX) score suggesting greater behavioural problems. Performance on the SRT task correlated with a composite measure of executive function. Head-injury thus produced heterogeneous impairments in the implicit acquisition of new information. Implicit activation of existing knowledge structures appeared intact. Impairments in implicit cognition and executive function may interact to produce dysfunctional behaviour after head-injury. Future comparisons of implicit and explicit cognition should use several measures of each function, to ensure that they measure the latent variable of interest
Lessons of spin and torsion: Reply to ``Consistent coupling to Dirac fields in teleparallelism"
In reply to the criticism made by Mielke in the pereceding Comment [Phys.
Rev. D69 (2004) 128501] on our recent paper, we once again explicitly
demonstrate the inconsistency of the coupling of a Dirac field to gravitation
in the teleparallel equivalent of general relativity. Moreover, we stress that
the mentioned inconsistency is generic for {\it all} sources with spin and is
by no means restricted to the Dirac field. In this sense the
-covariant generalization of the spinor fields in the teleparallel
gravity theory is irrelevant to the inconsistency problem.Comment: Revtex, 4 pages, no figure
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