The multi-functional foot in athletic movement: Extraordinary feats by our extraordinary feet

The unique architecture of the foot system provides a sensitive, multi-tensional method of communicating with the surrounding environment. Within the premise of the paper, we discuss three themes: complexity, degeneracy and bio-tensegrity. Complex structures within the foot allow the human movement system to negotiate strategies for dynamic movement during athletic endeavours. We discuss such complex structures with particular attention to properties of a bio-tensegrity system. Degeneracy within the foot structure offers a distinctive solution to the problems posed by differing terrains and uneven surfaces allowing lower extremity structures to overcome perturbation as and when it occurs. This extraordinary structure offers a significant contribution to bipedalism through presenting a robust base of support and as such, should be given more consideration when designing athletic development programmes

Ordinary and Extraordinary Hadrons

Resonances and enhancements in meson-meson scattering can be divided into two classes distinguished by their behavior as the number of colors N_c in QCD becomes large: The first are ordinary mesons that become stable as N_c goes to infinity. This class includes textbook q-bar q mesons as well as glueballs and hybrids. The second class, extraordinary mesons, are enhancements that disappear as N_c goes to infinity; they subside into the hadronic continuum. This class includes indistinct and controversial objects that have been classified as q-bar q-bar q q mesons or meson-meson molecules. Pelaez's study of the N_c dependence of unitarized chiral dynamics illustrates both classes: the p-wave pi-pi and K-pi resonances, the rho(770) and K*(892), behave as ordinary mesons; the s-wave pi-pi and K-pi enhancements, the sigma(600) and kappa(800), behave like extraordinary mesons. Ordinary mesons resemble Feshbach resonances while extraordinary mesons look more like effects due to potentials in meson-meson scattering channels. I build and explore toy models along these lines. Finally I discuss some related dynamical issues affecting the interpretation of extraordinary mesons.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures, talk presented at the 2006 Yukawa International Seminar: New Frontiers in QCD, Kyoto University, November 2006. This talk is dedicated to the memory of R. H. Dalit

Extraordinary vacuum black string solutions

In addition to the boosted static solution there are two other classes of stationary string-like solutions of the vacuum Einstein equation in (4+1)-dimensions. Each class is characterized by three parameters of mass, tension, and momentum flow along the fifth coordinate. We analyze the metric properties of one of the two classes, which was previously assumed to be naked singular, and show that the solution spectrum contains black string and wormhole in addition to the known naked singularity as the momentum flow to mass ratio increases. Interestingly, there does not exist new zero momentum solution in these cases.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, add 2 reference

Double grating formation in anisotropic photorefractive crystals

Double gratings form in anisotropic photorefractive crystals when two plane waves intersecting inside the crystal have both extraordinary and ordinary wave components. The effect can be observed by reading out the two gratings with extraordinary or ordinary light. Experiments confirm the theoretical predictions. The relevance of these results in using photorefractive crystals for holographic storage is discussed

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