Agrammatic but numerate

A central question in cognitive neuroscience concerns the extent to which language enables other higher cognitive functions. In the case of mathematics, the resources of the language faculty, both lexical and syntactic, have been claimed to be important for exact calculation, and some functional brain imaging studies have shown that calculation is associated with activation of a network of left-hemisphere language regions, such as the angular gyrus and the banks of the intraparietal sulcus. We investigate the integrity of mathematical calculations in three men with large left-hemisphere perisylvian lesions. Despite severe grammatical impairment and some difficulty in processing phonological and orthographic number words, all basic computational procedures were intact across patients. All three patients solved mathematical problems involving recursiveness and structure-dependent operations (for example, in generating solutions to bracket equations). To our knowledge, these results demonstrate for the first time the remarkable independence of mathematical calculations from language grammar in the mature cognitive system

Correlations around an interface

We compute one-loop correlation functions for the fluctuations of an interface using a field theory model. We obtain them from Feynman diagrams drawn with a propagator which is the inverse of the Hamiltonian of a Poschl-Teller problem. We derive an expression for the propagator in terms of elementary functions, show that it corresponds to the usual spectral sum, and use it to calculate quantities such as the surface tension and interface profile in two and three spatial dimensions. The three-dimensional quantities are rederived in a simple, unified manner, whereas those in two dimensions extend the existing literature, and are applicable to thin films. In addition, we compute the one-loop self-energy, which may be extracted from experiment, or from Monte Carlo simulations. Our results may be applied in various scenarios, which include fluctuations around topological defects in cosmology, supersymmetric domain walls, Z(N) bubbles in QCD, domain walls in magnetic systems, interfaces separating Bose-Einstein condensates, and interfaces in binary liquid mixtures.Comment: RevTeX, 13 pages, 6 figure

Aniline incorporated silica nanobubbles

We report the synthesis of stearate functionalized nanobubbles of SiO2 with a few aniline molecules inside, represented as C6H5NH2@SiO2@stearate, exhibiting fluorescence with red-shifted emission. Stearic acid functionalization allows the materials to be handled just as free molecules, for dissolution, precipitation, storage etc. The methodology adopted involves adsorption of aniline on the surface of gold nanoparticles with subsequent growth of a silica shell through monolayers, followed by the selective removal of the metal core either using sodium cyanide or by a new reaction involving halocarbons. The material is stable and can be stored for extended periods without loss of fluorescence. Spectroscopic and voltammetric properties of the system were studied in order to understand the interaction of aniline with the shell as well as the monolayer, whilst transmission electron microscopy has been used to study the silica shell