In all vertebrates hearing and touch represent two distinct sensory systems that both rely on the transformation of mechanical force into electrical signals. There is an extensive literature describing single gene mutations in humans that cause hearing impairment, but there are essentially none for touch. Here we first asked if touch sensitivity is a heritable trait and second whether there are...

INTRODUCTION Lung counting has many sources of uncertainty that can impact on the activity estimate such as different deposition patterns of radioactivity in the lung, rib size and placement, chest wall composition and profile, effect of detector size and thickness. For example, if a lung counter is calibrated using a lung set that has the activity homogeneously distributed throughout the tissu...

Traditional gender roles that define what is feminine and masculine also imply men have higher social status than women. These stereotypes still influence how people interact with each other computers. Touch behaviour, essential in interactions, an interesting example of such behaviours. The Midas touch effect describes a situation when brief used to one’s behaviour. Our study aimed analyse the...

When interacting with a regular desktop computer, indirect devices such as a mouse or keyboard are used to control the computer. Results of the interaction are displayed on a monitor. Current operating systems are restricted to one pointing device. With the introduction of multi-touch, a new form of human computer interaction is introduced. Multi-touch combines display technology with sensors w...

Muscle histochemical characteristics are decisive determinants of meat quality. The relative percentage and diameters of the different muscular fiber types influence crucial aspects of meat such as color, tenderness, and ultimate pH. Despite its relevance, however, the information on muscle fiber genetic architecture is scant, because histochemical muscle characterization is a laborious task. H...

Contact behaviours such as touch, have been shown to be influential channels of nonverbal communication between mothers and infants. While existing research has examined the communicative roles of maternal or infant touch in isolation, mutual touch, whereby touching behaviours occur simultaneously between mothers and their infants, has yet to be examined. The present study was designed to inves...

Although the previous studies have shown that an emotional context may alter touch processing, it is not clear how visual contextual information modulates the sensory signals, and at what levels does this modulation take place. Therefore, we investigated how a toucher's emotional expressions (anger, happiness, fear, and sadness) modulate touchee's somatosensory-evoked potentials (SEPs) in diffe...

Whole-cell patch recording is an essential tool for quantitatively establishing the biophysics of brain function, particularly in vivo. This method is of particular interest for studying the functional roles of cortical glial cells in the intact brain, which cannot be assessed with extracellular recordings. Nevertheless, a reasonable success rate remains a challenge because of stability, record...

This paper addresses issues affecting the implementation of a networked Hapto-Acoustic Virtual Reality Environment. This is a Virtual Reality system which combines 3D graphics visualisation, audio and touch interaction and which aims to produce a perceived real time interaction by the user with a computer generated model. Networking systems together makes it possible to collaborate in the virtu...