An annular shear cell has been used to investigate a number of factors known to influence stick-slip motion in an assembly of near monosized, spherical glass beads. In this paper, both the sample shear stress and volumetric strain were recorded, allowing new insights into the possible mechanics of stick-slip motion in a granular body. Rather than the commonly presented mechanism of sample dilat...

Comprehension of stick-slip motion is very important for understanding tribological principles. The transition from creep-dominated to inertia-dominated stick-slip as the increase of sliding velocity has been described by researchers. However, the associated micro-contact behavior during this transition has not been fully disclosed yet. In this study, we investigated the stick-slip behaviors of...

Three experiments examined the role of reference directions in spatial updating. Participants briefly viewed an array of five objects. A non-egocentric reference direction was primed by placing a stick under two objects in the array at the time of learning. After a short interval, participants detected which object had been moved at a novel view that was caused by table rotation or by their own...

In a Monte Carlo study the conductivity of two-dimensional random stick systems is investigated from the percolation threshold up to ten times the percolation threshold density. We propose a model explicitly depending on the stick density and junction-to-stick conductance ratio. The model describes the transition from the conductivity determined by the structure of a percolating cluster to the ...

We experimentally observed atomic-scale torsional stick-slip behavior in individual nanotubes of tungsten disulfide (WS2). When an external torque is applied to a WS2 nanotube, all its walls initially stick and twist together, until a critical torsion angle, at which the outer wall slips and twists around the inner walls, further undergoing a series of stick-slip torque oscillations. We present...

■ Figure 1 Audio Technology for the Network Age Last year Sony released the Memory Stick Walkman, which uses the Memory Stick as its recording media. The Memory Stick Walkman adopts the ATRAC3 (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding 3) high-quality audio encoding technology and achieves high-quality audio reproduction equivalent to that of MD players. ATRAC3 is a further development of the ATRAC te...

AIM To evaluate whether spontaneous skin conductance activity is an objective method for measuring the stress response to painful stimuli in premature infants. The number and amplitude of the waves and the baseline increase with the activity of the sympathetic nervous system. METHODS In 20 preterm infants of gestational age >/= 29 weeks, behavioural state and spontaneous skin conductance acti...

The mobility is a complex, yet not well understood, human cognitive process; it subtends several different tasks such as walking and orientation. The visually impaired people (VIP) mobility heavily depends on the white stick (or white cane) which however does not provide an efficient support for walking and orientation. Indeed, these two later functions implementation requires the usage of high...

Sliding friction across a thin soft lubricant film typically occurs by stick-slip, the lubricant fully solidifying at stick, yielding and flowing at slip. The static friction force per unit area preceding slip is known from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to decrease with increasing contact area. That makes the large-size fate of stick-slip unclear and unknown; its possible vanishing is imp...

background: exposure to blood-borne pathogens from needle-stick and sharp injuries continues to pose a significant risk to health care workers. these events are of concern because of the risk to transmit blood-borne diseases such as hepatitis b virus, hepatitis c virus, and the human immunodeficiency virus. objective: to benchmark different risk factors associated with needle-stick incidents am...