Not all humor is the same, yet little is known about the appeal of specific humor styles in romantic initiation. The current experimental study addresses this gap by investigating how romantic motives (short-term or long-term) affect individuals' anticipated use of, and response to, positive humor and negative humor. Heterosexual participants (n = 224) imagined the pursuit of either a desired s...

Recent studies investigating the relationship between self-reported sexual desire and attraction to same- and opposite-sex individuals have found that homosexual men's sexual desire is positively correlated with their self-reported attraction to own-sex individuals only, while homosexual women's sexual desire is positively correlated with their self-reported attraction to both men and women. Th...

We formulate a Lagrangian (individual-based) model to investigate the spacing of individuals in a social aggregate (e.g., swarm, flock, school, or herd). Mutual interactions of swarm members have been expressed as the gradient of a potential function in previous theoretical studies. In this specific case, one can construct a Lyapunov function, whose minima correspond to stable stationary states...

We study a possible electrostatic mechanism underlying the compaction of DNA inside the nuclei of eucaryotes: the tail-bridging effect between nucleosomes, the fundamental DNA packaging units of the chromatin complex. As a simple model of the nucleosome we introduce the eight-tail colloid, a charged sphere with eight oppositely charged, flexible, grafted chains that represent the terminal histo...

Two overall neutral surfaces with positively and negatively charged domains ("patches") have been shown in recent experiments to exhibit long-range attraction when immersed in an ionic solution. Motivated by the experiments, we calculate analytically the osmotic pressure between such surfaces within the Poisson-Boltzmann framework, using a variational principle for the surface-averaged free ene...

We demonstrate a dramatic change in the interaction forces between dark solitons in nonlocal nonlinear media. We present what we believe is the first experimental evidence of attraction of dark solitons. Our results indicate that attraction should be observable in other nonlocal systems, such as Bose-Einstein condensates with repulsive long-range interparticle interaction.

Deformation of a fluid interface caused by the presence of objects at the interface can lead to large lateral forces between objects. We explore these fluid-mediated attractive force between partially submerged vertical cylinders. Forces are experimentally measured by slowly separating cylinder pairs and cylinder triplets after capillary rise is initially established for cylinders in contact. F...