Peripheral inflammation causes mechanical pain behavior and increased action potential firing. However, most studies examine inflammatory pain at acute, rather than chronic time points, despite the greater burden of chronic pain on patient populations, especially aged individuals. Furthermore, there is disagreement in the field about whether primary afferents contribute to chronic pain. Therefo...

Previous study has shown that administration of melatonin into the anterior cingulate cortex contralateral to peripheral nerve injury prevented exacerbation of mechanical allodynia with a concurrent improvement of depression-like behavior in Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rats, a genetic variation of Wistar rats. In the present study, we examined the effect of the individual versus combined treatment of me...

Existence of cracks in industrial structures is one of the important causes of their failure, especially when they are subjected to important axial compressive forces that might lead to buckling. Therefore, it must be considered in stress analysis and designing and loading of such structures. In this paper, the buckling and post-buckling behaviors of stainless-steel cracked plates under axial c...

  Omni directional mobile robots have been popularly employed in several applications especially in soccer player robots considered in Robocup competitions. However, Omni directional navigation system, Omni-vision system and solenoid kicking mechanism in such mobile robots have not ever been combined. This situation brings the idea of a robot with no head direction into existence, a comprehensi...

Mechanical cues influence a wide range of cellular behaviors including motility, differentiation, and tumorigenesis. Although previous studies elucidated the role of specific players such as ion channels and focal adhesions as local mechanosensors, the investigation of how mechanical perturbations propagate across the cell is necessary to understand the spatial coordination of cellular processe...

Alternative models of cell mechanics depict the living cell as a simple mechanical continuum, porous filament gel, tensed cortical membrane, or tensegrity network that maintains a stabilizing prestress through incorporation of discrete structural elements that bear compression. Real-time microscopic analysis of cells containing GFP-labeled microtubules and associated mitochondria revealed that ...

Reconstruction of damaged nerves remains a significant unmet challenge in clinical medicine. To foster improvements, the control of neural stem cell (NSC) behaviors, including migration, proliferation and differentiation are critical factors to consider. Topographical and mechanical stimulation based on the control of biomaterial features is a promising approach, which are usually studied separ...

During the design process, a designer transforms an abstract functional description for a device into a physical description that satisfies the functional requirements. In this sense, design is a transformation from the functional domain to the physical domain; however, this transformation process is not well characterized nor understood for mechanical systems. The difficulty arises, at least i...

BACKGROUND Neuropathic pain is evasive to treat once developed, however evidence suggests that local administration of anesthetics near the time of injury reduces the development of neuropathic pain. As abnormal electrical signaling in the damaged nerve contributes to the initiation and maintenance of neuropathic pain, local administration of anesthetics prior to injury may reduce its developme...

Introduction: As sex differences have been observed repeatedly in chronic pain, it is likely that the gonadal hormones are responsible for these differences. To investigate the responsible mechanism for chronic pain different models have been created. This study is examining the effects of gonadal hormones on nociceptive responses of the rats in CCI (chronic constriction injury) and SNI (spread...