AIM Standardization of the technique to section the extratemporal facial nerve in rats and creation of a scale to evaluate facial movements in these animals before and after surgery. STUDY DESIGN Experimental. METHOD twenty Wistar rats were anesthetized with ketamine xylazine and submitted to sectioning of the facial nerve near its emergence through the mastoid foramen. Eye closure and blin...

Excessive sleepiness in drivers greatly increases the risk of traffic accidents. A compact, three-dimensional system for analyzing visual information from a face photograph using an infrared CCD camera was recently designed to monitor drivers. The present study aimed to examine whether temporal changes in autonomic activity as determined by spectral analysis of electrocardiogram heart rate vari...

Since the advent of single molecule spectroscopy in 1989, advances in the field have revealed a wealth of information on dynamics and sample heterogeneity unobtainable by traditional ensemble studies. Microscopy experiments are a common technique to characterize and probe single molecule dynamics, due to the combination of the diffraction limited spatial resolution and the availability of sensi...

Dye sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have shown great potential for clean, efficient, and inexpensive solar energy technology. DSSCs produce electricity by electron transfer between a dye and semiconductor. Unfortunately, the complex electron transfer mechanisms of are hypothesized to be a major cause in inefficiency. To model a typical DSSC structure, blinking is used to probe electron transfer ...

A characteristic property of colloidal semiconductor nanocrystal quantum dots (QDs) is their emission intermittency. Although a unifying theory of QD photoprocesses remains elusive, the importance of charged states is clear. We now report a new approach to directly study the role of surface charge on QD emission by adding metal ions to individual, core-only QDs immobilized in aqueous solution i...

We present a study of residence time statistics for N renewal processes with a long tailed distribution of the waiting time. Such processes describe many nonequilibrium systems ranging from the intensity of N blinking quantum dots to the residence time of N Brownian particles. With numerical simulations and exact calculations, we show sharp transitions for a critical number of degrees of freedo...

Single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer (smFRET) is a powerful tool to investigate the dynamics of biomolecular events in real time. However, it requires two fluorophores and can be applied only to dynamics that accompany large changes in distance between the molecules. Herein, we introduce a method for kinetic analysis based on control of fluorescence blinking (KACB), a general ...

Exponential blinking statistics was reported in oxidized Si nanoparticles and the switching mechanism was attributed to the activation and deactivation of unidentified nonradiative recombination centers. Using ab initio calculations we predicted that Si dangling bonds at the surface of oxidized nanoparticles introduce defect states which, depending on their charge and local stress conditions, m...

Depressive disorders are a leading cause of morbility and disability in the working population worldwide. Psychiatric assessment treatment depressive may be improved by using objective behavioral physiological biomarkers. In this work we present psychiatry telemedicine platform where two important biomarkers depression, eye-blinking rate heart variability, computed from video stream shown to cl...