Whisking rodents can discriminate finely textured objects using their vibrissae. The biomechanical and neural processes underlying such sensory tasks remain elusive. Here we combine the use of model micropatterned substrates and high-resolution videography of rats' whiskers during tactile exploration to study how texture information is mechanically encoded in the whisker motion. A biomechanical...

Seals with beaded whiskers-the majority of true seals (Phocids)-are able to trace even minute disturbance caused by prey fish in the ambient flow using only sensory input from their whiskers. The unique three-dimensional undulating morphology of seal whiskers has been associated with their capability of suppressing vortex-induced vibration and reducing drag. The exceptional hydrodynamic traits ...

The posterior parietal cortex (PPC) in rodents is reciprocally connected to primary somatosensory cortex (S1) and vibrissal motor area (M2). PPC could thus bridge incoming sensory information to motor output but the cellular activity map across PPC layers during sensorimotor whisker behavior remains largely unknown. To uncover the functional architecture in PPC during active tactile processing,...

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) can result in persistent sensorimotor and cognitive deficits including long-term altered sensory processing. The few animal models of sensory cortical processing effects of TBI have been limited to examination of effects immediately after TBI and only in some layers of cortex. We have now used the rat whisker tactile system and the cortex processing whisker-derived ...

BACKGROUND Clinically, it is well known that injury of mandibular nerve fiber induces persistent ectopic pain which can spread to a wide area of the orofacial region innervated by the uninjured trigeminal nerve branches. However, the exact mechanism of such persistent ectopic orofacial pain is not still known. The present study was undertaken to determine the role of connexin 43 in the trigemin...

Identifying terrain type is important for safely operating robots exploration in unstructured environments. In this letter, we firstly proposed a novel tapered whisker-based semi-supervised reservoir computing (TWSSRC) system improving classification and property estimation traversability assessment with low cost. Three Hall sensors are used to capture the vibration at different locations of wh...

Abstract Cuprate superconductor Bi 2 Sr CaCu O 8+ δ (BSCCO) has been a promising candidate of coherent, continuous, and compact THz light source owing to its intrinsic Josephson junction (IJJ) inside the crystal structure. In this paper, we utilized BSCCO cross-whisker (CW) junctions produce emitter device using whisker crystals which can be easily obtained compared with single crystals. As res...

Rats explore environments by sweeping their whiskers across objects and surfaces. Both sensor movement and repetitive sweeping typical for this behavior require that vibrotactile signals are integrated over time. While temporal integration properties of neurons along the whisker somatosensory pathway have been studied extensively, the consequences for behavior are unknown. Here, we investigate ...

Myelophil, an ethanolic extract of Astragali Radix and Salviae Radix, has been clinically used to treat chronic fatigue and stress related disorders in South Korea. In this study, we investigated the protective effects of Myelophil on a whisker removal-induced psycho-emotional stress model. SD rats were subjected to whisker removal after oral administration of Myelophil or ascorbic acid for con...

A large number of Sn whiskers have been found on the Pb-free solder finish on leadframes used in consumer electronic products. Some of the whiskers on eutectic SnCu finishes are long enough to short the neighboring legs of the leadframe. Tin whisker growth is known to be a stress relief phenomenon. We have performed synchrotron radiation X-ray micro-diffraction analysis to measure the local str...