The influence of expertise on brain activation of the action observation network during anticipation of tennis and volleyball serves

In many daily activities, and especially in sport, it is necessary to predict the effects of others' actions in order to initiate appropriate responses. Recently, researchers have suggested that the action-observation network (AON) including the cerebellum plays an essential role during such anticipation, particularly in sport expert performers. In the present study, we examined the influence of task-specific expertise on the AON by investigating differences between two expert groups trained in different sports while anticipating action effects. Altogether, 15 tennis and 16 volleyball experts anticipated the direction of observed tennis and volleyball serves while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The expert group in each sport acted as novice controls in the other sport with which they had only little experience. When contrasting anticipation in both expertise conditions with the corresponding untrained sport, a stronger activation of AON areas (SPL, SMA), and particularly of cerebellar structures, was observed. Furthermore, the neural activation within the cerebellum and the SPL was linearly correlated with participant's anticipation performance, irrespective of the specific expertise. For the SPL, this relationship also holds when an expert performs a domain-specific anticipation task. Notably, the stronger activation of the cerebellum as well as of the SMA and the SPL in the expertise conditions suggests that experts rely on their more fine-tuned perceptual-motor representations that have improved during years of training when anticipating the effects of others' actions in their preferred sport. The association of activation within the SPL and the cerebellum with the task achievement suggests that these areas are the predominant brain sites involved in fast motor predictions. The SPL reflects the processing of domain-specific contextual information and the cerebellum the usage of a predictive internal model to solve the anticipation task. © 2014 Balser, Lorey, Pilgramm, Naumann, Kindermann, Stark, Zentgraf, Williams and Munzert

The spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid

In contrast to the well known Fermi liquid theory of three dimensions, interacting one-dimensional and quasi one-dimensional systems of fermions are described at low energy by an effective theory known as Luttinger liquid theory. This theory is expressed in terms of collective many-body excitations that show exotic behavior such as spin-charge separation. Luttinger liquid theory is commonly applied on the premise that "low energy" describes both the spin and charge sectors. However, when the interactions in the system are very strong, as they typically are at low particle densities, the ratio of spin to charge energy may become exponentially small. It is then possible at very low temperatures for the energy to be low compared to the characteristic charge energy, but still high compared to the characteristic spin energy. This energy window of near ground-state charge degrees of freedom, but highly thermally excited spin degrees of freedom is called a spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid. The spin-incoherent Luttinger liquid exhibits a higher degree universality than the Luttinger liquid and its properties are qualitatively distinct. In this colloquium I detail some of the recent theoretical developments in the field and describe experimental indications of such a regime in gated semiconductor quantum wires.Comment: 21 pages, 18 figures. Updated references, corrected typo in Eq.(20) in journal versio

Phase Transitions in liquid Helium 3

The phase transitions of liquid Helium 3 are described by truncations of an exact nonperturbative renormalization group equation. The location of the first order transition lines and the jump in the order parameter are computed quantitatively. At the triple point we find indications for partially universal behaviour. We suggest experiments that could help to determine the effective interactions between fermion pairs.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, LaTe

Potential stocks and increments of woody biomass in the European Union under different management and climate scenarios

BACKGROUND: Forests play an important role in the global carbon flow. They can store carbon and can also provide wood which can substitute other materials. In EU27 the standing biomass is steadily increasing. Increments and harvests seem to have reached a plateau between 2005 and 2010. One reason for reaching this plateau will be the circumstance that the forests are getting older. High ages have the advantage that they typical show high carbon concentration and the disadvantage that the increment rates are decreasing. It should be investigated how biomass stock, harvests and increments will develop under different climate scenarios and two management scenarios where one is forcing to store high biomass amounts in forests and the other tries to have high increment rates and much harvested wood. RESULTS: A management which is maximising standing biomass will raise the stem wood carbon stocks from 30 tC/ha to 50 tC/ha until 2100. A management which is maximising increments will lower the stock to 20 tC/ha until 2100. The estimates for the climate scenarios A1b, B1 and E1 are different but there is much more effect by the management target than by the climate scenario. By maximising increments the harvests are 0.4 tC/ha/year higher than in the management which maximises the standing biomass. The increments until 2040 are close together but around 2100 the increments when maximising standing biomass are approximately 50 % lower than those when maximising increments. Cold regions will benefit from the climate changes in the climate scenarios by showing higher increments. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study suggest that forest management should maximise increments, not stocks to be more efficient in sense of climate change mitigation. This is true especially for regions which have already high carbon stocks in forests, what is the case in many regions in Europe. During the time span 2010-2100 the forests of EU27 will absorb additional 1750 million tC if they are managed to maximise increments compared if they are managed to maximise standing biomass. Incentives which will increase the standing biomass beyond the increment optimal biomass should therefore be avoided. Mechanisms which will maximise increments and sustainable harvests need to be developed to have substantial amounts of wood which can be used as substitution of non sustainable materials

DC-transport in superconducting point contacts: a full counting statistics view

We present a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the dc transport properties of superconducting point contacts. We determine the full counting statistics for these junctions, which allows us to calculate not only the current or the noise, but all the cumulants of the current distribution. We show how the knowledge of the statistics of charge transfer provides an unprecedented level of understanding of the different transport properties for a great variety of situations. We illustrate our results with the analysis of junctions between BCS superconductors, contacts between superconductors with pair-breaking mechanisms and short diffusive bridges. We also discuss the temperature dependence of the different cumulants and show the differences with normal contacts.Comment: revtex4, 20 pages, 15 figure

Production and detection of entangled electron-hole pairs in a degenerate electron gas

We demonstrate theoretically that the shot noise produced by a tunnel barrier in a two-channel conductor violates a Bell inequality. The non-locality is shown to originate from entangled electron-hole pairs created by tunneling events -- without requiring electron-electron interactions. The degree of entanglement (concurrence) equals 2(T_1 T_2)^1/2 (T_1+T_2)^-1, with T_1,T_2 << 1 the transmission eigenvalues. A pair of edge channels in the quantum Hall effect is proposed as experimental realization.Comment: 4 pages including 1 figure; three comments have been added to the reference list, addressing the entanglement of formation, the Clauser-Horne inequality, and the dephasing effect of a finite voltag

Fluctuation theorem for currents in open quantum systems

A quantum-mechanical framework is set up to describe the full counting statistics of particles flowing between reservoirs in an open system under time-dependent driving. A symmetry relation is obtained which is the consequence of microreversibility for the probability of the nonequilibrium work and the transfer of particles and energy between the reservoirs. In some appropriate long-time limit, the symmetry relation leads to a steady-state quantum fluctuation theorem for the currents between the reservoirs. On this basis, relationships are deduced which extend the Onsager-Casimir reciprocity relations to the nonlinear response coefficients.Comment: 19 page

Planar Drawings of Fixed-Mobile Bigraphs

A fixed-mobile bigraph G is a bipartite graph such that the vertices of one partition set are given with fixed positions in the plane and the mobile vertices of the other part, together with the edges, must be added to the drawing. We assume that G is planar and study the problem of finding, for a given k >= 0, a planar poly-line drawing of G with at most k bends per edge. In the most general case, we show NP-hardness. For k=0 and under additional constraints on the positions of the fixed or mobile vertices, we either prove that the problem is polynomial-time solvable or prove that it belongs to NP. Finally, we present a polynomial-time testing algorithm for a certain type of "layered" 1-bend drawings

PROJECTS BASED ON THE WEB PROCESSING SERVICE FRAMEWORK BIRDHOUSE

Birdhouse is a collaborative project open for the community to participate. It is a software framework containing a collection of Web Processing Services (WPS). The deployed algorithms are focusing on Earth Systems and environmental data processing with the philosophy of streamlining the software development and deployment. By supporting climate, earth observation and biodiversity data and processes, Birdhouse can be used in a wide array of Earth sciences projects and workflows. The core benefit of this project is to allow the seamless use of climate services developed by a diverse network of national meteorological offices, regional climate service providers, academics, not-for-profit research centers and private industry. As governments move toward open-data policies, there will be a need for analytical services that extract value out of the deluge of information. Using an interoperable software architecture, institutions can provide both data and services allowing users to process the data remotely from a laptop, instead of having to acquire and maintain large storage infrastructures