Why a soft touch can hurt

Why Words Can Hurt Us Social Relationships, Stress, and Health

Many students and other readers of this volume are familiar with coming down with a nasty cold or some other flu-like virus or bacterial infection around the time of final exams and having to spend a good portion of their holidays in bed recovering. The mechanisms by which increased susceptibility to pathogens and illness follow particularly stressful social periods, activities, and disappointm...

Dendritic cells--why can they help and hurt us.

Dendritic cells (DCs) show a Janus-like functional behavior. They help us by their orchestration of numerous immune responses to defend our body against invading pathogenic micro-organisms and also induce regulatory T cells to inhibit immune reactions against autoantigens as well as diverse harmless environmental antigens. However, DCs can also be of harm to us when misguided by their microenvi...

Can reassurance hurt ?

Development of Touch Based Interaction Mechanisms for the Hurt Project Development of Touch Based Interaction Mechanisms for the Hurt Project

Objective: To develop an interface optimized for touch and multi-touch input for the mobile control of robot teams. Background: Currently, the Human Robot Teaming (HuRT) project uses an interface that was not initially designed to support touch-based interaction. This interface design makes touch input difficult to implement and use. Method: A new interface was designed to incorporate general m...

A Sound You Can Touch

This paper describes the on going tech-tile project: an exploration of visual and sonic texture enabled by a mapping of textile images into sound and virtual patterns. This is performed live and ‘translated’ into new forms of material research through the jacquard process, itself a functioning conceptual machine within the analogous mechanism of the loom. The version of Swarm Tech-Tiles present...