Seismic hazard assessment like many other issues in seismology is a complicated problem, which is due to a variety of parameters affecting the occurrence of an earthquake. Uncertainty, which is a result of vagueness and incompleteness of the data, should be considered in a rational way. Using fuzzy method makes it possible to allow for uncertainties to be considered. Fuzzy inference system,...

The natural world continuously presents us with many opportunities for action, and thus a process of target selection must precede action execution. While there has been considerable progress in understanding target selection in stationary environments, little is known about target selection when we are in motion. Here we investigated the effect of self-motion signals on saccadic target selecti...

Little is known about how dynamic acceleration affects wheelchair-rider comfort. The current study was to test both the operation of an instrumented wheelchair by a wheelchair user over a Simulated Road Course (SRC) and the operation of the same instrumented wheelchair during normal daily activities (a field test) by test subjects. Sixteen subjects participated in the protocol. A SRC allowed co...

We present a theoretical study of heavy ion acceleration from ultrathin (20 nm) gold foil irradiated by high-intensity sub-picosecond lasers. Using two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations, three laser systems are modeled that cover the range between femtosecond and picosecond pulses. By varying the laser pulse duration we observe a transition from radiation pressure acceleration (RPA) to t...

Motorcycle helmets are essential for reducing the risk of head injuries in the event of an impact. However, during the design of helmets, a compromise must be made between user safety and user comfort. Accordingly, the present study proposes a novel open-face helmet design, in which the helmet features three ventilation slots in the upper-head region. Finite element analysis (FEA) models were c...

Thoracoabdominal breathing movements are a complex source of postural disturbance, but there are contradictory reports in the literature with inspiration described as having either a backward or a forward disturbing effect. To elucidate the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon, the present study studied the postural disturbance caused by isolated contractions of the diaphragm. Eight male and f...

INTRODUCTION Animal travel speed is an ecologically significant parameter, with implications for the study of energetics and animal behaviour. It is also necessary for the calculation of animal paths by dead-reckoning. Dead-reckoning uses heading and speed to calculate an animal's path through its environment on a fine scale. It is often used in aquatic environments, where transmission telemetr...

Several studies have investigated whether vestibular signals can be processed to determine the magnitude of passive body motions. Many of them required subjects to report their perceived displacements offline, i.e., after being submitted to passive displacements. Here, we used a protocol that allowed us to complement these results by asking subjects to report their introspective estimation of t...

The purpose of this study was to determine how linear and rotational accelerations affected the location of high strain areas in the brain. Acceleration pulses obtained from instrumented football helmets were used as the input to the SIMon finite element model (FEM) of the brain. The acceleration pulses used for this study were isolated from a dataset that included 1,712 impacts recorded during...

We use a model of solar eruptions that combines a loss-of-equilibrium coronal mass ejection (CME) model with a multi-threaded flare loop model in order to understand the relationship between the CME kinematics, thermal energy release, and soft X-ray emissions in solar eruptions. We examine the correlation between CME acceleration and the peak soft X-ray flux in many modeled cases with different...