Pneumatic capillary gun for ballistic delivery of microparticles

A pneumatic gun for ballistic delivery of microparticles to soft targets is proposed and demonstrated. The particles are accelerated by a high speed flow of Helium in a capillary tube. Vacuum suction applied to a concentric, larger diameter tube is used to divert substantially all of the flow of Helium from the gun nozzle, thereby preventing the gas from hitting and damaging the target. Speed of ejection of micron-sized gold particles from the gun nozzle, and their depth of penetration into agarose gels are reported.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

Speed-Accuracy Tradeoff in Olfaction

SummaryThe basic psychophysical principle of speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) has been used to understand key aspects of neuronal information processing in vision and audition, but the principle of SAT is still debated in olfaction. In this study we present the direct observation of SAT in olfaction. We developed a behavioral paradigm for mice in which both the duration of odorant sampling and the difficulty of the odor discrimination task were controlled by the experimenter. We observed that the accuracy of odor discrimination increases with the duration of imposed odorant sampling, and that the rate of this increase is slower for harder tasks. We also present a unifying picture of two previous, seemingly disparate experiments on timing of odorant sampling in odor discrimination tasks. The presence of SAT in olfaction provides strong evidence for temporal integration in olfaction and puts a constraint on models of olfactory processing

In Search of the Structure of Human Olfactory Space

We analyze the responses of human observers to an ensemble of monomolecular odorants. Each odorant is characterized by a set of 146 perceptual descriptors obtained from a database of odor character profiles. Each odorant is therefore represented by a point in a highly multidimensional sensory space. In this work we study the arrangement of odorants in this perceptual space. We argue that odorants densely sample a two-dimensional curved surface embedded in the multidimensional sensory space. This surface can account for more than half of the variance of the perceptual data. We also show that only 12% of experimental variance cannot be explained by curved surfaces of substantially small dimensionality (<10). We suggest that these curved manifolds represent the relevant spaces sampled by the human olfactory system, thereby providing surrogates for olfactory sensory space. For the case of 2D approximation, we relate the two parameters on the curved surface to the physico-chemical parameters of odorant molecules. We show that one of the dimensions is related to eigenvalues of molecules’ connectivity matrix, while the other is correlated with measures of molecules’ polarity. We discuss the behavioral significance of these findings

Single olfactory receptors set odor detection thresholds

In many species, survival depends on olfaction, yet the mechanisms that underlie olfactory sensitivity are not well understood. Here we examine how a conserved subset of olfactory receptors, the trace amine-associated receptors (TAARs), determine odor detection thresholds of mice to amines. We find that deleting all TAARs, or even single TAARs, results in significant odor detection deficits. This finding is not limited to TAARs, as the deletion of a canonical odorant receptor reduced behavioral sensitivity to its preferred ligand. Remarkably, behavioral threshold is set solely by the most sensitive receptor, with no contribution from other highly sensitive receptors. In addition, increasing the number of sensory neurons (and glomeruli) expressing a threshold-determining TAAR does not improve detection, indicating that sensitivity is not limited by the typical complement of sensory neurons. Our findings demonstrate that olfactory thresholds are set by the single highest affinity receptor and suggest that TAARs are evolutionarily conserved because they determine the sensitivity to a class of biologically relevant chemicals

Illuminating Vertebrate Olfactory Processing

The olfactory system encodes information about molecules by spatiotemporal patterns of activity across distributed populations of neurons and extracts information from these patterns to control specific behaviors. Recent studies used in vivo recordings, optogenetics, and other methods to analyze the mechanisms by which odor information is encoded and processed in the olfactory system, the functional connectivity within and between olfactory brain areas, and the impact of spatiotemporal patterning of neuronal activity on higher-order neurons and behavioral outputs. The results give rise to a faceted picture of olfactory processing and provide insights into fundamental mechanisms underlying neuronal computations. This review focuses on some of this work presented in a Mini-Symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in 2012.Molecular and Cellular Biolog

Parametric Generation of Second Sound by First Sound in Superfluid Helium

We report the first experimental observation of parametric generation of second sound (SS) by first sound (FS) in superfluid helium in a narrow temperature range in the vicinity of $T_\lambda$. The temperature dependence of the threshold FS amplitude is found to be in a good quantitative agreement with the theory suggested long time ago and corrected for a finite geometry. Strong amplitude fluctuations and two types of the SS spectra are observed above the bifurcation. The latter effect is quantitatively explained by the discreteness of the wave vector space and the strong temperature dependence of the SS dissipation length.Comment: 4 pages, 4 postscript figures, REVTE

Parametric generation of second sound in superfluid helium: linear stability and nonlinear dynamics

We report the experimental studies of a parametric excitation of a second sound (SS) by a first sound (FS) in a superfluid helium in a resonance cavity. The results on several topics in this system are presented: (i) The linear properties of the instability, namely, the threshold, its temperature and geometrical dependencies, and the spectra of SS just above the onset were measured. They were found to be in a good quantitative agreement with the theory. (ii) It was shown that the mechanism of SS amplitude saturation is due to the nonlinear attenuation of SS via three wave interactions between the SS waves. Strong low frequency amplitude fluctuations of SS above the threshold were observed. The spectra of these fluctuations had a universal shape with exponentially decaying tails. Furthermore, the spectral width grew continuously with the FS amplitude. The role of three and four wave interactions are discussed with respect to the nonlinear SS behavior. The first evidence of Gaussian statistics of the wave amplitudes for the parametrically generated wave ensemble was obtained. (iii) The experiments on simultaneous pumping of the FS and independent SS waves revealed new effects. Below the instability threshold, the SS phase conjugation as a result of three-wave interactions between the FS and SS waves was observed. Above the threshold two new effects were found: a giant amplification of the SS wave intensity and strong resonance oscillations of the SS wave amplitude as a function of the FS amplitude. Qualitative explanations of these effects are suggested.Comment: 73 pages, 23 figures. to appear in Phys. Rev. B, July 1 st (2001