Migratory decisions in birds are closely tied to environmental cues and fat stores, but it remains unknown if the same variables trigger bat migration. To learn more about the rare phenomenon of bat migration, we studied departure decisions of female common noctules (Nyctalus noctula) in southern Germany. We did not find the fattening period that modulates departure decisions in birds. Female n...

Three experiments investigated whether the systematic errors previously observed in a triangle-completion task were caused by failures to form and update a cognitive heading or by use of perceived heading (even though an updated cognitive heading was available) during the response. These errors were replicated when participants indicated the origin of triangular paths they had imagined walking ...

BACKGROUND Pressure ulcers are lesions caused by unrelieved pressure over bony prominences, resulting in damage to underlying tissues. The etiology is multifactorial including prolonged immobility. They usually complicate spinal cord injuries with long periods of bed confinement. The use of bed replacements markedly reduces the incidence of pressure ulcers, but the unaffordability of these repl...

Spontaneous improvements of plasma confinement during auxiliary heating have been observed in many tokamaks when the q profile has been modified from its normal resistive equilibrium so that q > 1 and the magnetic shear is reduced or reversed in a region near the magnetic axis. The effects on the overall plasma confinement result from the formation in the plasma interior of transport barriers, ...

Using Monte Carlo simulation, we study the influence of geometric confinement on demixing for a series of symmetric non-additive hard spheres mixtures confined in slit pores. We consider both a wide range of positive non-additivities and a series of pore widths, ranging from the pure two dimensional limit to a large pore width where results are close to the bulk three dimensional case. Critical...

Humans and monkeys use both vestibular and visual motion (optic flow) cues to discriminate their direction of self-motion during navigation. A striking property of heading perception from optic flow is that discrimination is most precise when subjects judge small variations in heading around straight ahead, whereas thresholds rise precipitously when subjects judge heading around an eccentric re...

We presented optic flow simulating eight directions of self-movement in the ground plane, while monkeys performed delayed match-to-sample tasks, and we recorded dorsal medial superior temporal (MSTd) neuronal activity. Randomly selected sample headings yield smaller test responses to the neuron's preferred heading when it is near the sample's heading direction and larger test responses to the p...

Heading estimation is vital to everyday navigation and locomotion. Despite extensive behavioral and physiological research on both visual and vestibular heading estimation over more than two decades, the accuracy of heading estimation has not yet been systematically evaluated. Therefore human visual and vestibular heading estimation was assessed in the horizontal plane using a motion platform a...