Based on recently published molecular phylogenies of Indo-West Pacific palaemonid shrimps and further morphological evidence, the systematic position of several species of the polyphyletic genus Periclimenes is revised. The generic name Ancylocaris Schenkel, 1902 is re-established for the anemone-associated Periclimenes brevicarpalis. Actinimenesgen. n., is proposed for the anemone-associated P...

Electromyograph (EMG) features have the properties of large variations and nonstationarity. An important issue in the classification of EMG is the classifier design. The major goal of this paper is to develop a classifier for the classification of eight kinds of prehensile postures to achieve high classification rate and reduce the online learning time. The cascaded architecture of neural netwo...

This study examined whether hand/object size ratios define common boundaries to the grip configuration patterns of infants and adults. A group of 5- to 8-month-old infants and a group of adults engaged in a displacement grasping task with inverted cups that varied in size. The findings showed that infant and adult grip configurations varied systematically with object size: More digits were brou...

Automatic grasp planning for robotic hands is a difficult problem because of the huge number of possible hand configurations. However, humans simplify the problem by choosing an appropriate prehensile posture appropriate for the object and task to be performed. By modeling an object as a set of shape primitives, such as spheres, cylinders, cones and boxes, we can use a set of rules to generate ...

Contact mechanics is related to the deformation study of solids that meet each other at one or more points. The physical and mathematical formulation of the problem is established upon the mechanics of materials and continuum mechanics and focuses on computations involving bodies with different characteristics in static or dynamic contact. Contact mechanics gives essential information for the s...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies have shown that the observation of an action causes subliminal activation within the motor system. However, the issue of whether such an effect is modulated by the match between the observed action and that the observer would have exhibited if acting under similar circumstances remains unclear. We address this issue by recording motor potentials e...

Dual-specificity tyrosine-regulated kinase 1A (DYRK1A) is a candidate gene for the Down syndrome neurological defects and may be involved in the progression of Alzheimer's disease. Heterozygous mice for Dyrk1A (Dyrk1A+/-) exhibit decreased brain size, motor abnormalities and cognitive deficits in the adult. However, there is no information about the mutant phenotype in old ages. Here we analyze...

Intuitive myoelectric prosthesis control is difficult to achieve due to the absence of proprioceptive feedback, which forces the user to monitor grip pressure by visual information. Existing myoelectric hand prostheses form a single degree of freedom pincer motion that inhibits the stable prehension of a range of objects. Multi-axis hands may address this lack of functionality, but as with mult...

A new species of green, prehensile-tailed pitviper of the genus Bothriechis is described from the Atlantic slopes of eastern Guatemala and western Honduras. This species appears to be most closely related to B. bicolor of the Pacific versant of Chiapas (Mexico) and Guatemala. Several other species of Bothriechis occur on the Atlantic versant of northern Central America, including two montane sp...