Mirror Neurons: Findings and Functions

Mirror neurons (MNs) are a set of premotor neurons that fire both during the performance of a motor action, and the observation of someone else performing the same action. Since their discovery, they have been the subject of great controversy. This survey provides a short overview of the history and the most important findings of MN research in animals and humans. Special focus is given to the latest findings on empathy and relevant disorders i.e. autism, schizophrenia and psychopathy, in the context of MNs. Finally a review of the criticism on MNs is provided and discussed

A Randomised Controlled Trial of Sodium Citrate Spray for Non-Conductive Olfactory Disorders

Background: Previous research has suggested that sodium citrate improves hyposmia by decreasing mucus calcium levels in the nose. This study aimed to confirm or refute this effect in a single application and assess potential side effects. Methodology: Study design was a randomised double-blind controlled trial of sodium citrate nasal spray (intervention) versus sterile water (control) in a tertiary care clinic. Fifty-five patients with non-conductive olfactory loss were randomised to receive the intervention or placebo. The primary outcome measure was improvement in measured olfactory thresholds for phenyl ethyl alcohol (PEA) over 2 hours. Other outcome measures assessed were Improvement in olfactory thresholds in 1-butanol, eucalyptol and acetic acid; number of responders with a clinically relevant response in each arm; adverse effects. Results: A significant effect was seen in the intervention arm for PEA and for 1-butanol and eucalyptol when compared to the control arm (P<0.05); 32% of the intervention arm responded in terms of improved sensitivity towards some of the odours. Minor adverse effects noted included sore throat, nasal paraesthesia, slight rhinorrhoea and itching. The duration of effect of the citrate is transient, peaking at 30-60 minutes after application. Conclusions: Sodium citrate yields some potential as a treatment for non-conductive olfactory loss, however these findings require corroboration in further clinical trials looking at longer-term regular use of the spray as a viable therapeutic option for patients where it would be applied at frequent intervals such as before meal times

Similarity and bisimilarity notions appropriate for characterizing indistinguishability in fragments of the calculus of relations

Motivated by applications in databases, this paper considers various fragments of the calculus of binary relations. The fragments are obtained by leaving out, or keeping in, some of the standard operators, along with some derived operators such as set difference, projection, coprojection, and residuation. For each considered fragment, a characterization is obtained for when two given binary relational structures are indistinguishable by expressions in that fragment. The characterizations are based on appropriately adapted notions of simulation and bisimulation.Comment: 36 pages, Journal of Logic and Computation 201

Application of multi-edge HERFD-XAS to assess the uranium valence electronic structure in potassium uranate (KUO3)

The uranium valence electronic structure in the prototypical undistorted perovskite KUO3 is reported on the basis of a comprehensive experimental study using multi-edge HERFD-XAS and relativistic quantum chemistry calculations based on density functional theory. Very good agreement is obtained between theory and experiments, including the confirmation of previously reported Laporte forbidden f –f transitions and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopic measurements. Many spectral features are clearly identified in the probed U-f, U- p and U-d states and the contribution of the O-p states in those features could be assessed. The octahedral crystal field strength, 10Dq, was found to be 6.6 (1.5) eV and 6.9 (4) eV from experiment and calculations, respectively. Calculated electron binding energies down to U-4f states are also reported.Peer reviewe

Relative Expressive Power of Navigational Querying on Graphs

Motivated by both established and new applications, we study navigational query languages for graphs (binary relations). The simplest language has only the two operators union and composition, together with the identity relation. We make more powerful languages by adding any of the following operators: intersection; set difference; projection; coprojection; converse; and the diversity relation. All these operators map binary relations to binary relations. We compare the expressive power of all resulting languages. We do this not only for general path queries (queries where the result may be any binary relation) but also for boolean or yes/no queries (expressed by the nonemptiness of an expression). For both cases, we present the complete Hasse diagram of relative expressiveness. In particular the Hasse diagram for boolean queries contains some nontrivial separations and a few surprising collapses.Comment: An extended abstract announcing the results of this paper was presented at the 14th International Conference on Database Theory, Uppsala, Sweden, March 201