instruments, huge statistical samples, and years of training, Provine's investigation seems almost naively simplistic. Much of his data come from simple surveys conducted of his students (how many times have you been tickled in the last month?), qualitative observations of people's chuckles, and recordings taken in shopping malls of people laughing. His discovery that contralateral self-ticklin...

This article continues my earlier work of reading Jung with Lacan. This article will develop Zizek’s work on Lacan’s concept of objet petit a by relating it to a phenomenological interpretation of Jung. I use a number of different examples, including Zizek’s interpretation of Francis Bacon, Edvard Munch, Hans Holbein and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, to describe the objet petit a and its relationship...

The contrast between self- and other-produced tickles, as a special case of sensory attenuation for self-produced actions, has long been a target of empirical research. While in standard wake states it is nearly impossible to tickle oneself, there are interesting exceptions. Notably, participants awakened from REM (rapid eye movement-) sleep dreams are able to tickle themselves. So far, however...

Several receptors are implicated in apoptotic cell (AC) uptake by phagocytic cells; however, their relative dominance in mammalian systems remains to be established. New studies shed light on the role of the phosphatidyl serine (PS) receptor (PSR). Ligation of PSR by PS on AC surfaces is considered essential for signaling uptake of ACs that are tethered to phagocytes via other receptors.

Fragments of mainstream programming languages are formalised in order to show desirable properties of their static semantics. We ask if said formalisms could also be used to define a test suite for the mainstream programming language in question, and what the utility of such a suite would be. In this work, we present our findings from testing Java with Featherweight Java (FJ). We take the synta...

The aim of this study was to investigate changes in gene expression after tactile stimulation (tickling) accompanied by positive emotion in the adolescent rat brain. We observed a positive emotional response (50-kHz ultrasonic vocalizations) after tickling using a modified version of the Panksepp method, and then comprehensively compared gene expression levels in the hypothalamus of the tickled...