Birds living in social groups establish dominance hierarchies, and taking up the dominant position influences behaviour and physiological parameters. In cooperatively breeding white-browed sparrow weavers (Plocepasser mahali), the transition from subordinate helper to dominant breeder male induces the production of a new type of song. This song contains a large number of new syllables and diffe...

Autosomal dominant myotonia congenita (Thomsen's disease) is caused by mutations in the muscle chloride channel CIC-1. Several point mutations found in affected families (I29OM, R317Q, P480L, and Q552R) dramatically shift gating to positive voltages in mutant/WT heterooligomeric channels, and when measurable, even more so in mutant homooligomers. These channels can no longer contribute to the r...

BACKGROUND Together with visual information, awareness of limb position and movement is essential for limb coordination. A proprioceptive deficit has been demonstrated in a number of rheumatological disorders. There is a lack of a portable device for measuring hand proprioception in the field. METHODS A compact portable device for measuring joint position sense in the metacarpophalangeal join...

1. Subordinate helpers in cooperative societies may gain both immediate and future benefits, including paternity and territorial inheritance. However, if such opportunities correlate with rank in the queue, it is unclear why such queues should be stable. 2. In cooperatively breeding superb fairy-wrens Malurus cyaneus, only males are generally philopatric, and form stable hierarchical queues for...

We present a procedure to split (or segment) touching numerals. We are neither assuming a dominant orientation for the text direction nor long character strings. The basic idea is to compute the convex hull of the outer contour, to choose a baseline from one of the sides of the convex hull and to project the pixels of the touching characters (either perpendicularly or at a slant). Lu's function...

Previous studies of grapheme-colour synaesthesia have suggested that words tend to be coloured by their initial letter or initial vowel (e.g., Baron-Cohen et al., 1993; Ward et al., 2005). We examine this assumption in two ways. First, we show that letter position and syllable stress have been confounded, such that the initial letters of a word are often in stressed position (e.g., 'wo-man, 'ta...

In a previous paper (Webster & Wolpert, 1966 a) it was shown that during regulation the time required for the determination of the dominant region, the hypostome, was dependent on the original position of the hypostome-forming region on the linear axis. Hypostome determination occurred more quickly from distal than from proximal regions, suggesting an axial gradient. As Spiegelman (1945) has po...

The effect of wrist flexion-extension on the median nerve appearance, namely the cross-sectional area (MNCSA) and the longitudinal (D1) and vertical (D2) diameters, was investigated among older adults (N = 34). Ultrasound examination was conducted to examine the median nerve at different wrist angles (neutral; and 15°, 30°, and 45° extension and flexion), in both the dominant and nondominant ha...

The egocentric reference frame is essential for body orientation and spatial localization of external objects. Recent neuroimaging and lesion studies have revealed that the right hemisphere of humans may play a more dominant role in processing egocentric information than the left hemisphere. However, previous studies of egocentric discrimination mainly focused on assessing the accuracy of egoce...

BACKGROUND The anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) is one of the most important stabilisers of the knee joint. The key role of ACL is to resist anterior translation of the tibia in relation to the femur. At the same time, ACL does not only perform a mechanical limiting function, but is also an important component of the sensorimotor system. The aim of this study was to assess neuromuscular control...