Comparison of acute non-visual bright light responses in patients with optic nerve disease, glaucoma and healthy controls.

This study examined the effect of optic nerve disease, hence retinal ganglion cell loss, on non-visual functions related to melanopsin signalling. Test subjects were patients with bilateral visual loss and optic atrophy from either hereditary optic neuropathy (n = 11) or glaucoma (n = 11). We measured melatonin suppression, subjective sleepiness and cognitive functions in response to bright light exposure in the evening. We also quantified the post-illumination pupil response to a blue light stimulus. All results were compared to age-matched controls (n = 22). Both groups of patients showed similar melatonin suppression when compared to their controls. Greater melatonin suppression was intra-individually correlated to larger post-illumination pupil response in patients and controls. Only the glaucoma patients demonstrated a relative attenuation of their pupil response. In addition, they were sleepier with slower reaction times during nocturnal light exposure. In conclusion, glaucomatous, but not hereditary, optic neuropathy is associated with reduced acute light effects. At mild to moderate stages of disease, this is detected only in the pupil function and not in responses conveyed via the retinohypothalamic tract such as melatonin suppression

Talaria: Continuous Drag & Drop on a Wall Display

International audienceWe present an interaction technique combining tactile actions and Midair pointing to access out-of-reach content on large displays without the need to walk across the display. Users can start through a Touch gesture on the display surface and finish Midair by pointing to push content away or inversely to retrieve a content. The technique takes advantage of wellknown semantics of pointing in human-to-human interaction.These, coupled with the semantics of proximal relations and deictic proxemics make the proposed technique very powerful as it leverages on well-understood human-human interaction modalities. Experimental results show this technique to outperform direct tactile interaction on dragging tasks. From our experience we derive four guidelines for interaction with large-scale displays

Dynamical properties of water in living cells

With the aim of studying the effect of water dynamics on the properties of biological systems, in this paper, we present a quasi-elastic neutron scattering study on three different types of living cells, differing both in their morphological and tumor properties. The measured scattering signal, which essentially originates from hydrogen atoms present in the investigated systems, has been analyzed using a global fitting strategy using an optimized theoretical model that considers various classes of hydrogen atoms and allows disentangling diffusive and rotational motions. The approach has been carefully validated by checking the reliability of the calculation of parameters and their 99% confidence intervals. We demonstrate that quasi-elastic neutron scattering is a suitable experimental technique to characterize the dynamics of intracellular water in the angstrom/picosecond space/time scale and to investigate the effect of water dynamics on cellular biodiversity

Correlations of structural, magnetic, and dielectric properties of undoped and doped CaCu3Ti4O12

The present work reports synthesis, as well as a detailed and careful characterization of structural, magnetic, and dielectric properties of differently tempered undoped and doped CaCu3Ti4O12 (CCTO) ceramics. For this purpose, neutron and x-ray powder diffraction, SQUID measurements, and dielectric spectroscopy have been performed. Mn-, Fe-, and Ni-doped CCTO ceramics were investigated in great detail to document the influence of low-level doping with 3d metals on the antiferromagnetic structure and dielectric properties. In the light of possible magnetoelectric coupling in these doped ceramics, the dielectric measurements were also carried out in external magnetic fields up to 7 T, showing a minor but significant dependence of the dielectric constant on the applied magnetic field. Undoped CCTO is well-known for its colossal dielectric constant in a broad frequency and temperature range. With the present extended characterization of doped as well as undoped CCTO, we want to address the question why doping with only 1% Mn or 0.5% Fe decreases the room-temperature dielectric constant of CCTO by a factor of ~100 with a concomitant reduction of the conductivity, whereas 0.5% Ni doping changes the dielectric properties only slightly. In addition, diffraction experiments and magnetic investigations were undertaken to check for possible correlations of the magnitude of the colossal dielectric constants with structural details or with magnetic properties like the magnetic ordering, the Curie-Weiss temperatures, or the paramagnetic moment. It is revealed, that while the magnetic ordering temperature and the effective moment of all investigated CCTO ceramics are rather similar, there is a dramatic influence of doping and tempering time on the Curie-Weiss constant.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figure

Characterisation of the muon beams for the Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment

A novel single-particle technique to measure emittance has been developed and used to characterise seventeen different muon beams for the Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment (MICE). The muon beams, whose mean momenta vary from 171 to 281 MeV/c, have emittances of approximately 1.2–2.3 π mm-rad horizontally and 0.6–1.0 π mm-rad vertically, a horizontal dispersion of 90–190 mm and momentum spreads of about 25 MeV/c. There is reasonable agreement between the measured parameters of the beams and the results of simulations. The beams are found to meet the requirements of MICE

Electron-muon ranger: performance in the MICE muon beam

The Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) will perform a detailed study of ionization cooling to evaluate the feasibility of the technique. To carry out this program, MICE requires an efficient particle-identification (PID) system to identify muons. The Electron-Muon Ranger (EMR) is a fully-active tracking-calorimeter that forms part of the PID system and tags muons that traverse the cooling channel without decaying. The detector is capable of identifying electrons with an efficiency of 98.6%, providing a purity for the MICE beam that exceeds 99.8%. The EMR also proved to be a powerful tool for the reconstruction of muon momenta in the range 100–280 MeV/c

Electron-muon ranger: performance in the MICE muon beam

The Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) will perform a detailed study of ionization cooling to evaluate the feasibility of the technique. To carry out this program, MICE requires an efficient particle-identification (PID) system to identify muons. The Electron-Muon Ranger (EMR) is a fully-active tracking-calorimeter that forms part of the PID system and tags muons that traverse the cooling channel without decaying. The detector is capable of identifying electrons with an efficiency of 98.6%, providing a purity for the MICE beam that exceeds 99.8%. The EMR also proved to be a powerful tool for the reconstruction of muon momenta in the range 100–280 MeV/c