Grasping an object is a matter of first moving a prehensile organ at some position in the world, and then managing the contact relationship between the prehensile organ and the object. Once the contact relationship has been established and made stable, the object is part of the body and it can move in the world. As any action, the action of grasping is ontologically anchored in the physical spa...

U pper extremity loss represents a life-changing, often devastating event, affecting nearly every activity of daily living and subsequently leaving a patient with substantial disability. The potential immediate dependency and despair resulting from the loss of one or both hands cannot be overstated. Promising technological advances in upper extremity prostheses include improved neural-control i...

Effects of grazing low-endophyte (Acremonium coenophialum Morgan-Jones and Gams, less than 1% infection) Johnstone (J) or high-endophyte (60% infection) Kentucky-31 (K) tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea Schreb.) on grazing behavior and voluntary intake were studied. Six Angus steers (average initial BW = 326 kg) grazed 1.21-ha plots of each forage cultivar (three steers per cultivar) in four 28-...

Martensina thailandica gen. et sp. nov., a freshwater ostracod species representing new subfamily, Martensininae subfam. in the family Cyprididae, is here described from swamp Maha Sarakham Province, Thailand. The genus and mainly characterized by 7-segmented antennula which has Rome organ remarkably long aesthetasc ya, morphology of sexually dimorphic antenna (A2), markedly elongated A2 termin...

Non-prehensile manipulation, such as pushing, is an important function for robots to move objects and is sometimes preferred as an alternative to grasping. However, due to unknown frictional forces, pushing has been proven a difficult task for robots. We explore the use of reinforcement learning to train a robot to robustly push an object. In order to deal with the sample complexity of training...

Exceptional fossil specimens with preserved soft parts from the Maotianshan Shale (ca 520 Myr ago) and the Burgess Shale (505 Myr ago) biotas indicate that the worldwide distributed bivalved arthropod Isoxys was probably a non-benthic visual predator. New lines of evidence come from the functional morphology of its powerful prehensile frontal appendages that, combined with large spherical eyes,...

Three new species of non-marine ostracods, Strandesia martensi n. sp., Strandesia pholpunthini n. sp. and Oncocypris rostrata n. sp., are here described from the Northeastern part of Thailand. Strandesia martensi n. sp. is similar to Strandesia perakensis Victor & Fernando, 1981 and to Strandesia sanoamuangae Savatenalinton & Martens, 2010. It can be distinguished from these two species by the ...