The ability to regenerate whole-body structures has been studied for many decades and is of particular interest for stem cell research due to its therapeutic potential. Several vertebrate and invertebrate species have been used as model systems to study pathways involved in regeneration in the past. Among invertebrates, cephalopods are considered as highly evolved organisms, which exhibit elabo...

Mercury concentrations were measured in tissues of 12 individuals of Octopus vulgaris, captured by the commercial fishery at two points along the Portuguese coast, Viana do Castelo and Cascais, in spring 2002. Concentrations were determined in six tissues (digestive gland, branchial hearts, gills, mantle, arms, and gonads). Correlations between mercury concentrations in different tissues were e...

Octopuses (Octopus vulgaris) are generally considered to possess extraordinary cognitive abilities including the ability to successfully perform in a serial reversal learning task. During reversal learning, an animal is presented with a discrimination problem and after reaching a learning criterion, the signs of the stimuli are reversed: the former positive becomes the negative stimulus and vic...

Auditory streaming enables perception and interpretation of complex acoustic environments that contain competing sound sources. At early stages of central processing, sounds are segregated into separate streams representing attributes that later merge into acoustic objects. Streaming of temporal cues is critical for perceiving vocal communication, such as human speech, but our understanding of ...

Abstract Recent research hypothesised that the Siculo-Tunisian Strait might fit, at least for some species, picture of a genetic transitional zone instead sharp break between Western and Eastern Mediterranean basins. The present study aimed using common Octopus, Octopus vulgaris as an empirical test-case to evaluate this hypothesis. To accomplish goal, 458 new sequences mitochondrial gene cytoc...

Living under intense predation pressure, octopuses evolved an effective and impressive camouflaging ability that exploits features of their surroundings to enable them to "blend in." To achieve such background matching, an animal may use general resemblance and reproduce characteristics of its entire surroundings, or it may imitate a specific object in its immediate environment. Using image ana...

Non-volatile memory (NVM) and remote direct memory access (RDMA) provide extremely high performance in storage and network hardware. However, existing distributed file systems strictly isolate file system and network layers, and the heavy layered software designs leave high-speed hardware under-exploited. In this paper, we propose an RDMA-enabled distributed persistent memory file system, Octop...

Previous theories of conceptual combination have failed to address the possible role of suprasegmental factors such as prosodic emphasis patterns. Here, we investigated the effect of emphasising the initial word (modifier emphasis), both words (dual emphasis), or the final word (head emphasis) on people’s interpretations of novel noun-noun compounds (e.g., octopus apartment). We found that dual...

Legged robots have extremely important applications in unstructured environments, e.g. accomplishing rescuing and detecting tasks in the earthquake and nuclear accidents instead of human beings. In such environments, legged robots must have the potential to plan gaits autonomously based on the site environment without detailed instructions from a human operator. In this paper, we present an aut...