The face, beauty, and symmetry: Perceiving asymmetry in beautiful faces

The relationship between bilateral facial symmetry and beauty remains to be clarified. Here, straight head-on photographs of “beautiful” faces from the collections of professional modeling agencies were selected. First, beauty ratings were obtained for these faces. Then, the authors created symmetrical left-left and right-right composites of the beautiful faces and asked a new group of subjects to choose the most attractive pair member. “Same” responses were allowed. No difference between the left-left and right-right composites was revealed but significant differences were obtained between “same” and the left-left or right-right. These results show that subjects detected asymmetry in beauty and suggest that very beautiful faces can be functionally asymmetrical

Hemispheric effects of canonical views of category members with known typicality levels

Is there a preferred hemispheric canonical view of a visual concept? We investigated this question in a natural superordinate category membership decision task using a hemi-field paradigm. Participants had to decide whether or not an image of an object lateralized in the left (LVF) or right (RVF) visual half field is a member of a predesignated superordinate category. The objects represented high, medium, or low typicality levels, and each object had 6 different perspective views (front, front-right, front-left, side, back-left, and back-right). The latency responses revealed a significant interaction of Hemi Field X View X Typicality (there was no hemi-field difference in accuracy). The findings confirm the presence of asymmetry in stored concepts in long-term memory and suggest, in addition, a hemispheric canonical view of these concepts, a view strongly related to typicality level

Functional asymmetry in the human face: Perception of health in the left and right sides of the face

The expression of health on the human face, like beauty or emotions, is an important biological display. Previous findings of left-right functional asymmetry in facial attractiveness and the linkage of attractiveness and health in evolutionary biology notions have prompted the present study. A total of 38 pairs of left-left and right-right facial composites were viewed by 24 subjects on a computer screen, and the task was to decide which member of the pair looked healthier or there was no difference. The results revealed a significant interactions between face side and sex of face. Right-right composites of women's faces were judged significantly healthier than left-left, whereas in men's faces, no significant left-right difference emerged. As these results parallel previous findings of attractiveness in the identical set of faces, we propose that evolutionary biology notions linking the appearance of health and of attractiveness apply to the human face as well

Mountain-Shaped Coupler for Ultra Wideband Applications

This paper demonstrates a novel mountain-shaped design for a compact 3-dB coupler operating at ultra-wideband (UWB) frequencies from 3.1GHz to 10.6 GHz. The proposed design was accomplished using multilayer technology in which the structure is formed by three layers of conductors interleaved by a layer of substrate between each conductor layer. Simulation was carried out using CST Microwave Studio; the result was then compared with results from rectangular and star-shaped couplers that implemented the same technique. The results obtained show that the proposed new coupler has better performance compared to both rectangular and star-shaped coupler designs in terms of return loss, isolation, and phase difference. The coupler was fabricated and measured; the measurement results satisfactorily agree with the simulation results

Compact wideband broadside-coupled microstrip-slot bandpass filter for communication applications

This paper proposes a compact size design of wideband bandpass filter (BPF). The broad-side coupling microstrip-slot technique is used to accomplish a good passband response with very low insertion loss across a wideband frequency range. The BPF that is designed using Rogers RO4003C substrate shows a good performance with the respective maximum reflection coefficient and insertion loss of -10 dB and 1.2 dB between 0.92 GHz and 5 GHz. This type of BPF filter is useful in any communication applications

The right-hemisphere and valence hypotheses: could they both be right (and sometimes left)?

The two halves of the brain are believed to play different roles in emotional processing, but the specific contribution of each hemisphere continues to be debated. The right-hemisphere hypothesis suggests that the right cerebrum is dominant for processing all emotions regardless of affective valence, whereas the valence specific hypothesis posits that the left hemisphere is specialized for processing positive affect while the right hemisphere is specialized for negative affect. Here, healthy participants viewed two split visual-field facial affect perception tasks during functional magnetic resonance imaging, one presenting chimeric happy faces (i.e. half happy/half neutral) and the other presenting identical sad chimera (i.e. half sad/half neutral), each masked immediately by a neutral face. Results suggest that the posterior right hemisphere is generically activated during non-conscious emotional face perception regardless of affective valence, although greater activation is produced by negative facial cues. The posterior left hemisphere was generally less activated by emotional faces, but also appeared to recruit bilateral anterior brain regions in a valence-specific manner. Findings suggest simultaneous operation of aspects of both hypotheses, suggesting that these two rival theories may not actually be in opposition, but may instead reflect different facets of a complex distributed emotion processing system

Effect of Interphase Region and Neighboring Particles on Electric Field Intensity within Nanocomposite Systems

Recent works show that the presence of the interphase surrounding nanoparticles can improve the dielectric properties of nanocomposites. Also, neighboring particles in the nanocomposites affect the electric field distribution. Therefore, the objective of this paper to model and analyze the effect of onedimensional (1D) nanofillers towards the electric field distribution when the interphase and neighboring are taken into account inside the nanocomposite system. By using Finite Element Method Magnetics (FEMM) 4.2 software, a model of nanocomposites system consists of polymer matrix, nanoparticle filler with interphase and neighboring particles is modeled under the electrostatic problem module. Electric field intensity is observed with different distance between adjacent nanoparticles and interphase region permittivity values. The result obtained show that the presence of the interphase with various permittivity value will result in distorted electric field intensity surrounding a nanoparticle. Furthermore, the electric field intensity also affected when adjacent nanoparticles displaced between each other within nanocomposites

Inclusion in the World Health Organization model list of essential medicines of non-vitamin K anticoagulants for treatment of non-valvular atrial fibrillation: a step towards reducing the burden of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality

Non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants (NOACs) represent a paradigm shift in the treatment of non-valvular atrial fibrillation (AF) with major practice guidelines around the world recommending NOACs over vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants for initial treatment of AF for stroke prevention. Here we describe the evidence collated and the process followed for the successful inclusion of NOACs into the 21st WHO Model List of Essential Medicines (EML). Individual NOACs have been reported to be non-inferior or superior to warfarin in preventing stroke and systemic embolism in eligible AF patients with a reduction in the risk of stroke and systemic embolism and a lower risk of major bleeding in patients with non-valvular AF compared with warfarin in both RCTs and real-world data. The successful inclusion of NOACs in the WHO EML is an important step forward in the global fight against cardiovascular morbidity and mortality, especially in low- and middle-income countries, where the burden of disease is high and limited access to diagnosis and treatment translates into a higher burden of morbidity, mortality, and economic costs

The Effect of Chamfering Structure towards the Design of Open Loop Resonator Bandpass Filter for Microwave Applications

Filter is the most essential components in the transceiver system. It is used to accept and reject any unwanted frequencies that falls out of the bands. Recently, the design of bandpass filter (BPF) has been a great challenges for RF designer. Although many researches have designed filter in the unlicensed frequency but most of the filter suffered from high insertion loss, inadequate selectivity and wider bandwidth. Therefore, this project design an Open-Loop Resonator Bandpass Filter (OLRBPF) to produce a low loss filter to operate at 2.4 GHz frequency. In order to overcome the high insertion loss, chamfered bend is introduced and implemented at the OLRBPF’s structure. This will reduce the radiation loss produced and enhanced the coupling between both resonators of the filter. The results show that the proposed OLRBPF produce better insertion loss compare to conventional filter