Stomatopods have an elaborate visual system served by a retina that is unique to this class of pancrustaceans. Its upper and lower eye hemispheres encode luminance and linear polarization while an equatorial band of photoreceptors termed the midband detects color, circularly polarized light and linear polarization in the ultraviolet. In common with many malacostracan crustaceans, stomatopods have

This chapter explores logistics of participation as a backstage practice of international law’s knowledge production. For its purpose logistics of participation refers to material conditions of possibility of part taking. Taking essay as its form this chapter ties together seemingly dispersed threads in order to reveal how and through what practices scholars of the South are overburdened to partic

In the process of object-based change detection (OBCD), scale is a significant factor related to extraction and analyses of subsequent change data. To address this problem, this paper describes an object-based approach to urban area change detection (CD) using rotation forest (RoF) and coarse-to-fine uncertainty analyses of multi-temporal high-resolution remote sensing images. First, highly homoge

Bullshit-sensitivity is the ability to distinguish pseudo-profound bullshit sentences (e.g. “Your movement transforms universal observations”) from genuinely profound sentences (e.g. “The person who never made a mistake never tried something new”). Although bullshit-sensitivity has been linked to other individual difference measures, it has not yet been shown to predict any actual behavior. We the

Evidence that bird odour can encode social information that can be used in chemical communication is growing, but is restricted to a few taxonomic groups. Among birds, diurnal raptors (i.e. birds from the Accipitriformes and Falconiformes order) have always been considered as mainly relying on their visual abilities. Although they seem to have a functional sense of smell, whether their odour can c

Single-molecule force spectroscopy and modeling have revealed that the adhesion molecule vinculin and F-actin form a catch bond that is dependent on the direction of forces along the actin filament. This may underlie the mechanisms by which cells sense directional physical cues.

Cell migration is initiated in response to biochemical or physical cues in the environment that promote actin-mediated lamellipodial protrusion followed by the formation of nascent integrin adhesions (NAs) within the protrusion to drive leading edge advance. Although FAK is known to be required for cell migration through effects on focal adhesions, its role in NA formation and lamellipodial dynami

Cancer cells are defined by their ability to invade through the basement membrane, a critical step during metastasis. While increased secretion of proteases, which facilitates degradation of the basement membrane, and alterations in the cytoskeletal architecture of cancer cells have been previously studied, the contribution of the mechanical properties of cells in invasion is unclear. Here, we app

In the past decade, high throughput screening (HTS) has changed the way biochemical assays are performed, but manipulation and mechanical measurement of micro- and nanoscale systems have not benefited from this trend. Techniques using microbeads (particles approximately 0.1-10 mum) show promise for enabling high throughput mechanical measurements of microscopic systems. We demonstrate instrumentat

Many biological processes are influenced by the mechanical rigidity of surrounding tissues. Now, a combination of experiments and mathematical modelling has been used to describe the precise molecular and physical mechanism by which cells sense and respond to the mechanical properties of their extracellular environment through integrin-based adhesions.

Vinculin is an essential and highly conserved cell adhesion protein, found at both focal adhesions and adherens junctions, where it couples integrins or cadherins to the actin cytoskeleton. Vinculin is involved in controlling cell shape, motility, and cell survival, and has more recently been shown to play a role in force transduction. The tail domain of vinculin (Vt) contains determinants necessa

How individual cells respond to mechanical forces is of considerable interest to biologists as force affects many aspects of cell behaviour. The application of force on integrins triggers cytoskeletal rearrangements and growth of the associated adhesion complex, resulting in increased cellular stiffness, also known as reinforcement. Although RhoA has been shown to play a role during reinforcement,

Motile cilia are unique multimotor systems that display coordination and periodicity while imparting forces to biological fluids. They play important roles in normal physiology, and ciliopathies are implicated in a growing number of human diseases. In this work we measure the response of individual human airway cilia to calibrated forces transmitted via spot-labeled magnetic microbeads. Cilia resp