BACKGROUND Noni fruit is widely consumed in tropical regions of Indonesia to the Hawaiian Islands. The noni plant has a long history of use as a medicinal plant to treat a wide variety of ailments including CNS disorders. The present investigation was designed to evaluate the antipsychotic effect of noni fruits (Morinda citrifolia Linn.) using mouse models of apomorphine-induced climbing behavi...

One of the basic problems of user on manual wheelchair is overcoming architectural barriers (kerbs, stairs etc.) on its way. Even though many research studies have been reported in different fields to increase the independence of wheelchair users, the question of overcoming obstacles by a wheelchair always remains as topic of discussion for many researchers. In this paper, the author has propos...

BACKGROUND Although studies have demonstrated that stair prompts are associated with increased physical activity, many were conducted in low-rise buildings over a period of weeks and did not differentiate between stair climbing and descent. PURPOSE This study evaluated the impact of a prompt across different building types, and on stair climbing versus descent over several months. METHODS I...

Climbing plants require an external support to grow vertically and enhance light acquisition. Vines that find a suitable support have greater performance and fitness than those that remain prostrate. Therefore, the location of a suitable support is a key process in the life history of climbing plants. Numerous studies on climbing plant behaviour have elucidated mechanistic details of support se...

Species exposed to extreme environments often exhibit distinctive traits that help meet the demands of such habitats. Such traits could evolve independently, but under intense selective pressures of extreme environments some existing structures or behaviors might be coopted to meet specialized demands, evolving via the process of exaptation. We evaluated the potential for exaptation to have ope...

Climbing has a low risk of injury and strengthens the entire musculature. Due to its benefits in physical and mental health as well as its high fun factor climbing is an established way of therapy. So far, the usefulness of climbing therapy has not been shown for people with haemophilia (PWH). A crucial requirement for physical activity in PWH is regular prophylaxis. As the patient’s individual...

Several well-known Miocene catarrhines, including Proconsul heseloni, have been inferred to combine quadrupedal walking in an arboreal substrate with a significant amount of climbing during locomotion. The degree to which some of these species were adapted to perform these behaviors is not fully understood due to the mosaic of 'ape-like' and 'monkey-like' traits identified in the forelimb. Give...

Advances in planetary robotics have led to wheeled robots that have beamed back invaluable science data from the surface of the Moon and Mars. However, these large wheeled robots are unable to access rugged environments such as cliffs, canyons and crater walls that contain exposed rock-faces and are geological time-capsules into the early Moon and Mars. We have proposed the SphereX robot with a...

This study empirically investigates variations of hill climbing algorithms for training artiicial neural networks on the 5-bit parity classiication task. The experiments compare the algorithms when they use diierent combinations of random number distributions, variations in the step size and changes of the neural net-works' initial weight distribution. A hill climbing algorithm which uses inlin...