The hippocampus has long been known to play a role in allocentric spatial coding, but its specific involvement in reorientation, or the recalibration of a disrupted egocentric spatial representation using allocentric spatial information, has received less attention. Initially, the cognitive literature on reorientation focused on a "geometric module" sensitive to the shape formed by extended sur...

Liquid crystals are often combined with polymers to influence the liquid crystals' orientation and mechanical properties, but at the expense of reorientation speed or uniformity of alignment. We introduce a new method to create self-assembled nematic liquid-crystal gels using an ABA triblock copolymer with a side-group liquid-crystalline midblock and liquid-crystal-phobic endblocks. In contrast...

The solvent reorganization energy of outer sphere electron transfer in polar liquids is derived in a molecular treatment. The reorganization energy is shown to be the sum of two contributions: the reorganization energy of reorientation of liquid permanent dipoles and the energy of reorganization of the liquid density. Reorientation of the dipoles gives the main contribution to the solvent reorg...

Tight-binding molecular dynamics and density-functional simulations on silicon seeded with a di-interstitial reveal its detailed diffusion mechanisms. The lowest-energy di-interstitial performs a translation/rotation diffusion-step with a barrier of 0.3 eV and a prefactor of 11 THz followed by a reorientation diffusion step with a 90 meV barrier and a 2300 THz prefactor. The intermediate reorie...

Research on navigation has shown that humans and laboratory animals recover their sense of orientation primarily by detecting geometric properties of large-scale surface layouts (e.g. room shape), but the reasons for the primacy of layout geometry have not been clarified. In four experiments, we tested whether 4-year-old children reorient by the geometry of extended wall-like surfaces because s...

Humans and animals recover their sense of position and orientation using properties of the surface layout, but the processes underlying this ability are disputed. Although behavioral and neurophysiological experiments on animals long have suggested that reorientation depends on representations of surface distance, recent experiments on young children join experimental studies and computational ...

An NMR study on ethane and five isotopomers dissolved in the nematic liquid crystal Merck ZLI 1132 is performed. A consistent set of dipolar and quadrupolar couplings is obtained. The dipolar couplings are corrected for harmonic vibrational effects, while the contribution from the torsional motion is incorporated classically. The corrected dipolar couplings cannot be understood in terms of a re...