Vibrotactile masking through the body

Even by this stage of processing the body-in-the-brain is treated as an integrated whole. however, this arrangement does not help us understand how the "flat map" in the cortex is turned into a useable representation of a three-dimensional body. Research investigating the representation of touch has tended to focus on the fingers and hands, with relatively few studies examining the whole body (but see an important way to study the tactile sense is through the use of masking in which the sensitivity at one location is affected by vibration applied at a remote site. traditionally, long-range tactile masking effects have been studied using the fingers, hands and arms, where masking has been found to occur between mirror-symmetric points across the body One reason that the limbs might be a special case, apart from their obvious motility, is that they fall within the visual field. Recent evidence (tipper et al. 2001; harrar and harris 2010; Pritchett and harris 2011) has suggested, counterintuitively, that tactile location may be coded at least partially in visual coordinates. however, we can never completely see our entire body and many regions, for example the back can never be seen. how then might the Abstract touches on one hand or forearm can affect tactile sensitivity at contralateral locations on the opposite side of the body. these interactions suggest an intimate connection between the two sides of the body. here, we explore the effect of masking not across the body but through the body by measuring the effect of a masking stimulus on the back on the tactile sensitivity of the corresponding point on the front. tactile sensitivity was measured on each side of the stomach, while vibrotactile masking stimulation was applied to one side of the front and to points on the back including the point directly behind the test point on the front. Results were compared to sensitivity, while vibrotactile stimulation was applied to a control site on the shoulder. a reduction in sensitivity of about .8 dB was found that required the masking stimulus to be within about 2 cm of the corresponding point on the back

Cervical Cancer Screening at a Crossroads: Learnings from the Past Driving Change for the Future

Cervical cancer screening has been one of the most impactful human interventions in medical history, saving the lives of countless thousands of women since the introduction of organized cytology screening programs. Today, we stand at a crossroads in the fight against cervical cancer, with several countries actively engaged in introducing primary human papillomavirus (HPV) testing and vaccination as more effective means of prevention. This chapter discusses the history of organized screening and how this led to HPV test methods to detect cervical cancer. We go on to examine the technologies used to screen for high-risk HPV types and how they affect clinical performance. We examine the evidence for primary HPV screening and review recent self-collection initiatives to reach underserved women, including the use of urine as novel sample type. In addition, we critically examine the evolution of HPV test methods and make the case for the use of extended genotyping as an improved risk stratification tool for guiding clinical management. Finally, we look to the future of cervical cancer screening and consider options for future management programs

Compositions and methods for treating bone deficit conditions

Compounds containing two aromatic systems covalently linked through a linker containing one or more atoms, or “linker” defined as including a covalent bond per se so as to space the aromatic systems at a distance 1.5-15 å, are effective in treating conditions associated with bone deficits. The compounds can be administered to vertebrate subjects alone or in combination with additional agents that promote bone growth or that inhibit bone resorption. They can be screened for activity prior to administration by assessing their ability to effect the transcription of a reporter gene coupled to a promoter associated with a bone morphogenetic protein and/or their ability to stimulate calvarial growth in model animal systems.Board of Regents, University of Texas Syste

Asymmetrical representation of body orientation

The perceived orientation of objects, gravity, and the body are biased to the left. Whether this leftward bias is attributable to biases in sensing or processing vestibular, visual, and body sense cues has never been assessed directly. The orientation in which characters are most easily recognized-the perceived upright (PU)-can be well predicted from a weighted vector sum of these sensory cues. A simple form of this model assumes that the directions of the contributing inputs are coded accurately and as a consequence participants tilted leftor right-side-down relative to gravity should exhibit mirror symmetric patterns of responses. If a left/right asymmetry were present then varying these sensory cues could be used to assess in which sensory modality or modalities a PU bias may have arisen. Participants completed the Oriented Character Recognition Test (OCHART) while manipulating body posture and visual orientation cues relative to gravity. The response patterns showed systematic differences depending on which side they were tilted. An asymmetry of the PU was found to be best modeled by adding a leftward bias of 5.68 to the perceived orientation of the body relative to its actual orientation relative to the head. The asymmetry in the effect of body orientation is reminiscent of the body-defined left-leaning asymmetry in the perceived direction of light coming from above and reports that people tend to adopt a right-leaning posture

Status of Muon Collider Research and Development and Future Plans

The status of the research on muon colliders is discussed and plans are outlined for future theoretical and experimental studies. Besides continued work on the parameters of a 3-4 and 0.5 TeV center-of-mass (CoM) energy collider, many studies are now concentrating on a machine near 0.1 TeV (CoM) that could be a factory for the s-channel production of Higgs particles. We discuss the research on the various components in such muon colliders, starting from the proton accelerator needed to generate pions from a heavy-Z target and proceeding through the phase rotation and decay ($\pi \to \mu \nu_{\mu}$) channel, muon cooling, acceleration, storage in a collider ring and the collider detector. We also present theoretical and experimental R & D plans for the next several years that should lead to a better understanding of the design and feasibility issues for all of the components. This report is an update of the progress on the R & D since the Feasibility Study of Muon Colliders presented at the Snowmass'96 Workshop [R. B. Palmer, A. Sessler and A. Tollestrup, Proceedings of the 1996 DPF/DPB Summer Study on High-Energy Physics (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Menlo Park, CA, 1997)].Comment: 95 pages, 75 figures. Submitted to Physical Review Special Topics, Accelerators and Beam

The \u3cem\u3eChlamydomonas\u3c/em\u3e Genome Reveals the Evolution of Key Animal and Plant Functions

Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is a unicellular green alga whose lineage diverged from land plants over 1 billion years ago. It is a model system for studying chloroplast-based photosynthesis, as well as the structure, assembly, and function of eukaryotic flagella (cilia), which were inherited from the common ancestor of plants and animals, but lost in land plants. We sequenced the ∼120-megabase nuclear genome of Chlamydomonas and performed comparative phylogenomic analyses, identifying genes encoding uncharacterized proteins that are likely associated with the function and biogenesis of chloroplasts or eukaryotic flagella. Analyses of the Chlamydomonas genome advance our understanding of the ancestral eukaryotic cell, reveal previously unknown genes associated with photosynthetic and flagellar functions, and establish links between ciliopathy and the composition and function of flagella

Animal Interactions and the Emergence of Territoriality

Inferring the role of interactions in territorial animals relies upon accurate recordings of the behaviour of neighbouring individuals. Such accurate recordings are rarely available from field studies. As a result, quantification of the interaction mechanisms has often relied upon theoretical approaches, which hitherto have been limited to comparisons of macroscopic population-level predictions from un-tested interaction models. Here we present a quantitative framework that possesses a microscopic testable hypothesis on the mechanism of conspecific avoidance mediated by olfactory signals in the form of scent marks. We find that the key parameters controlling territoriality are two: the average territory size, i.e. the inverse of the population density, and the time span during which animal scent marks remain active. Since permanent monitoring of a territorial border is not possible, scent marks need to function in the temporary absence of the resident. As chemical signals carried by the scent only last a finite amount of time, each animal needs to revisit territorial boundaries frequently and refresh its own scent marks in order to deter possible intruders. The size of the territory an animal can maintain is thus proportional to the time necessary for an animal to move between its own territorial boundaries. By using an agent-based model to take into account the possible spatio-temporal movement trajectories of individual animals, we show that the emerging territories are the result of a form of collective animal movement where, different to shoaling, flocking or herding, interactions are highly heterogeneous in space and time. The applicability of our hypothesis has been tested with a prototypical territorial animal, the red fox (Vulpes vulpes)