An argument is presented for discontinuing the term ‘contraction’ when describing the so-called active state of muscles and replacing it with a neutral term such as ‘hardening’. The opposite state of the muscle would be called ‘softening’. Hardening as a so-called active state of a muscle may be accompanied by lengthening, shortening, or no dimensional change in the anatomical muscle, depending...

An ingenious new experiment used a form of kinesin with one slow head and one fast head to demonstrate definitively that this motor protein moves along a microtubule using alternating left and right steps.

Squirrel monkeys were trained using newly developed visual-vestibular mismatch paradigms to test the asymmetrical simultaneous induction of vertical vestibuloocular reflex (VOR) gain changes in opposite directions (high and low) either in the upward and downward directions or in response to high- and low-frequency stimuli. The first paradigm consists of sinusoidal head movement [A sin(omegat)] ...

Research on linguistic biases shows that stereotypic expectancies are implicitly reflected in language and thereby subtly communicated to message recipients. We examined whether these findings extend to the use of negations (e.g., not smart instead of stupid). We hypothesized that people use more negations in descriptions of stereotype inconsistent behavior than in descriptions of stereotype co...

To help officially launch the Tobacco Control Blog, this month's Editorial has also been posted to the blog and is ready for your comments. The aim of this blog is to stimulate debate, generate ideas and explore new and, at times, controversial ideas. Increasing the opportunities for interaction between readers, authors, and editors is essential to ensuring that the journal remains on the leadi...

The logic of hybrid MKNF (minimal knowledge and negation as failure) is a powerful representation language that elegantly pairs ASP (answer set programming) with ontologies. Disjunctive rules are desirable extension to normal rule-based reasoning typically semantic frameworks designed for bases need substantial restructuring support disjunctive rules. Alternatively, one may lift characterizatio...

Previous studies have employed various models for exploring menu use, focusing mainly on short menus. In this study, long pull-down menus were examined in an item selection experiment. Our base model assumed that 1) the first eye fixation was located at the top, middle, or end of a menu depending on the search item; 2) menu scanning is either downward or upward; 3) the mouse was slowly moved do...

Logical characterizations of nondeterministic, probabilistic, and Markovian variants of bisimulation equivalence rely on similar modal languages, each including true, negation, conjunction, and diamond. Likewise, logical characterizations of the corresponding variants of trace equivalence rely on similar modal languages, each including only true and diamond. Unfortunately, this is not the case ...

AutoTutor is a tutoring system that helps students construct answers to deep-reasoning questions by holding a conversation in natural language. AutoTutor delivers its dialog moves with an animated conversational agent whereas students type in their answers via keyboard. We conducted an experiment on 81 college students who learned topics on computer literacy (hardware, operating systems, intern...