This study depicts how captive kea, New Zealand parrots, which are not known to use tools in the wild, employ a stick-tool to retrieve a food reward after receiving demonstration trials. Four out of six animals succeeded in doing so despite physical (beak curvature) and ecological (no stick-like materials used during nest construction) constraints when handling elongated objects. We further dem...

It is proposed that the inertial range clustering of small heavy particles in fluid turbulence occurs as a result of the sweep-stick mechanism which causes inertial particles to cluster so as to mimic the clusters of points where the fluid acceleration is perpendicular to the direction of highest contraction between neighboring particles. Direct numerical simulations of inertial particles subje...

We present a versatile high voltage sample stick that fits into all cryomagnets and standard cryostats at the Swiss Spallation Neutron Source, Paul Scherrer Institut, and which provides a low effort route to neutron scattering experiments that combine electric field with low temperature and magnetic field. The stick allows for voltages up to 5 kV and can be easily adapted for different scatteri...

This study depicts how captive kea, New Zealand parrots, which are not known to use tools in the wild, employ a stick-tool to retrieve a food reward after receiving demonstration trials. Four out of six animals succeeded in doing so despite physical (beak curvature) and ecological (no stick-like materials used during nest construction) constraints when handling elongated objects. We further dem...

SUMMARY. The class of stick-breaking priors and their extensions are considered in classification and clustering problems in which the complexity, the number of possible models or clusters, can be either bounded or unbounded. A conjugacy property for the ex tended stick-breaking prior is established which allows for informative characterizations of the priors under i.i.d. sampling, and which fu...

BACKGROUND Staphylococcus epidermidis is a part of the skin's normal flora that can cause acne. This study was designed to evaluate the efficacy of nicotinamide as a stick in eradication of staphylococcus. MATERIALS AND METHODS For evaluating of Anti-microbial effect on S. epidermidis used well plate method. We chose five plates for nicotinamide and five for mupirocin. The zones of inhibition...

Fabrication of thin-film solar cells (TFSCs) on substrates other than Si and glass has been challenging because these nonconventional substrates are not suitable for the current TFSC fabrication processes due to poor surface flatness and low tolerance to high temperature and chemical processing. Here, we report a new peel-and-stick process that circumvents these fabrication challenges by peelin...

Sliding friction across a thin soft lubricant film typically occurs by stick slip, the lubricant fully solidifying at stick, yielding and flowing at slip. The static friction force per unit area preceding slip is known from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to decrease with increasing contact area. That makes the large-size fate of stick slip unclear and unknown; its possible vanishing is imp...

In this paper, we focus on naturally incorporating contact modes estimation in a dynamical simulation of an object with multiple contacts. More specifically, this paper presents an algorithm to simulate a meter stick trick using a Linear Complementarity Problem (LCP) formulation. A meter stick, modeled as a planar uniform horizontal rod in gravity, is supported by two point contacts or ”fingers...

An experimental study comparing different user interfaces for a virtual drum is reported. Virtual here means that the drum is not a physical object. 16 subjects played the drum on five different interfaces and two metronome patterns trying to match their hits to the metronome clicks. Temporal accuracy of the playing was evaluated. The subjects also rated the interfaces subjectively. The results...