Department of Basic Medical Sciences, Neurosciences and Sense Organs, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Bari, Italy Department of Mechanics, Mathematics and Management, Politecnico di Bari, Bari, Italy Department of Periodontology and Oral Implantology, Pravara Institute of Medical Sciences, Loni, Maharashtra, India Laboratory of Stem Cell Research and Application, University of Science, Vietnam Na...

Western science rests on the philosophical foundation of materialist monism, according to which only physical matter exists and therefore only physical matter can be known. Furthermore, matter is known to us only through the sense organs or indirectly through instruments. Consequently valid knowledge can only be derived from a logical interpretation of sensory experience. Materialist monism (he...

My first hypothesis is that there is a strong interdependence between the nature of emotions and the way they are represented. I should here like to understand 'representation' in an obvious sense, i.e. as a technical term for sensory and neurophysiological processes. For it is not only since Descartes that epistemology has been accompanied by medical models attempting to provide a material bas...

The phenotype of an organism is determined by the genes, the environment and stochastic developmental events. Although recognized as a basic biological principle influencing life history, susceptibility to diseases, and probably evolution, developmental variation (DV) has been only poorly investigated due to the lack of a suitable model organism. This obstacle could be overcome by using the rec...

The embryonic peripheral nervous system of Drosophila contains two main types of sensory neurons: type I neurons, which innervate external sense organs and chordotonal organs, and type II multidendritic neurons. Here, we analyse the origin of the difference between type I and type II in the case of the neurons that depend on the proneural genes of the achaete-scute complex (ASC). We show that, ...

Ctenophores are traditionally regarded as "lower" metazoans, sharing with cnidarians a diploblastic grade of organization. Unlike cnidarians, where skeletonization (biomineralization and sclerotization) evolved repeatedly among ecologically important taxa (for example, scleractinians and octocorals), living ctenophores are characteristically soft-bodied animals. We report six sclerotized and ar...

The timing of early animal evolution remains poorly resolved, yet remains critical for understanding nervous system evolution. Methods for estimating divergence times from sequence data have improved considerably, providing a more refined understanding of key divergences. The best molecular estimates point to the origin of metazoans and bilaterians tens to hundreds of millions of years earlier ...

Historically, physiology is the daughter of pathology. Healthy people struggling with an overwhelming nature had no time to bother with the workings of their organs, and doctors-naturallywere always preoccupied with disease. For them the argument from malfunction to normal function has become almost second nature and the successes of this approach in such fields as neurology, endocrinology, and...

Current trends in artificial nose research are strongly influenced by knowledge of biological olfactory systems. Insects have evolved over millions of years to detect and maneuver toward a food source or mate, or away from predators. The insect olfactory system is able to identify volatiles on a time scale that matches their ability to maneuver. Here, biological olfactory sense organs, insect a...

Previous work revealed that bloodsucking bugs can discriminate between oscillating changes in infrared (IR) radiation and air temperature (T) using two types of warm cells located in peg-in-pit sensilla and tapered hairs (Zopf LM, Lazzari CR, Tichy H. J Neurophysiol 111: 1341-1349, 2014). These two stimuli are encoded and discriminated by the response quotient of the two warm cell types. IR rad...