Grasping Ideas with the Motor System: Semantic Somatotopy in Idiom Comprehension

Single words and sentences referring to bodily actions activate the motor cortex. However, this semantic grounding of concrete language does not address the critical question whether the sensory–motor system contributes to the processing of abstract meaning and thought. We examined functional magnetic resonance imaging activation to idioms and literal sentences including arm- and leg-related action words. A common left fronto-temporal network was engaged in sentence reading, with idioms yielding relatively stronger activity in (pre)frontal and middle temporal cortex. Crucially, somatotopic activation along the motor strip, in central and precentral cortex, was elicited by idiomatic and literal sentences, reflecting the body part reference of the words embedded in the sentences. Semantic somatotopy was most pronounced after sentence ending, thus reflecting sentence-level processing rather than that of single words. These results indicate that semantic representations grounded in the sensory–motor system play a role in the composition of sentence-level meaning, even in the case of idioms

Performance of the LHCb outer tracker

The LHCb Outer Tracker is a gaseous detector covering an area of 5 × 6 m2 with 12 double layers of straw tubes. The detector with its services are described together with the commissioning and calibration procedures. Based on data of the first LHC running period from 2010 to 2012, the performance of the readout electronics and the single hit resolution and efficiency are presented. The efficiency to detect a hit in the central half of the straw is estimated to be 99.2%, and the position resolution is determined to be approximately 200 μm. The Outer Tracker received a dose in the hottest region corresponding to 0.12 C/cm, and no signs of gain deterioration or other ageing effects are observed

Oculomotor Control, Brain Potentials, and Timelines of Word Recognition During Natural Reading

Reading requires the orchestration of vision, attention, and language processes, usually along with the programming of eye movements. The co-registration of eye movements and electroencephalography (EEG) during natural reading promises to deliver two complementary sets of information. Fixation durations reflect the difficulty of sublexical, lexical, and sentence-level properties, such as the frequency and predictability of the fixated word and (at least) its left and right neighbors; they reveal space-related constraints of distributed processing in the perceptual span. Co-registered fixation-related potentials (FRPs) yield time-related constraints of word recognition within fixation durations. Effects of word frequency and predictability in FRPs are shown to be qualitatively similar to those in event-related potentials (ERPs) measured during serial visual presentation of sentence words. However, FRPs and ERPs differ with respect to the timelines associated with frequency and predictability effects. It is anticipated that space-related and time-related constraints of word recognition during reading will guide the further development of computational models of eye-movement control during reading as well as their integration with computational models of (isolated) word recognitio

Species diversification – which species should we use?

Large detector systems for particle and astroparticle physics; Particle tracking detectors; Gaseous detectors; Calorimeters; Cherenkov detectors; Particle identification methods; Photon detectors for UV. visible and IR photons; Detector alignment and calibration methods; Detector cooling and thermo-stabilization; Detector design and construction technologies and materials. The LHCb experiment is dedicated to precision measurements of CP violation and rare decays of B hadrons at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (Geneva). The initial configuration and expected performance of the detector and associated systems. as established by test beam measurements and simulation studies. is described. © 2008 IOP Publishing Ltd and SISSA