Quantitative insights into the stress-transfer mechanisms that determine the mechanical properties of tunicate cellulose whisker/poly(vinyl acetate) nanocomposites were gained by Raman spectroscopy. The extent of stress-transfer is influenced by local orientation (or anisotropy) of the whiskers, which in turn is governed by the processing conditions used to fabricate the nanocomposites. Solutio...

Single cortical neurons in the mammalian brain receive signals arising from multiple sensory input channels. Dendritic integration of these afferent signals is critical in determining the amplitude and time course of the neurons' output signals. As of yet, little is known about the spatial and temporal organization of converging sensory inputs. Here, we combined in vivo two-photon imaging with ...

The Qinzhou Bay-Hangzhou Bay joint belt is a significant tectonic zone between the Yangtze and Cathaysian plates, where plentiful hydrothermal siliceous rocks are generated. Here, the authors studied the distribution of the siliceous rocks in the whole tectonic zone, which indicated that the tensional setting was facilitating the development of siliceous rocks of hydrothermal genesis. According...

We investigated the natural resonance properties and damping characteristics of rat macrovibrissae (whiskers). Isolated whiskers rigidly fixed at the base showed first-mode resonance peaks between 27 and 260 Hz, principally depending on whisker length. These experimentally measured resonant frequencies were matched using a theoretical model of the whisker as a conical cantilever beam, with Youn...

We have developed software for fully automated tracking of vibrissae (whiskers) in high-speed videos (>500 Hz) of head-fixed, behaving rodents trimmed to a single row of whiskers. Performance was assessed against a manually curated dataset consisting of 1.32 million video frames comprising 4.5 million whisker traces. The current implementation detects whiskers with a recall of 99.998% and ident...

Rodents use their whiskers (vibrissae) for tactile perception. Our artificial whiskers follow the basic design of the follicle of rodent vibrissae. In experiments with the artificial whiskers, we have explored tactile perception based on active whisking, and found the deflection amplitude or velocity provides the localization information of a target obeject. Based on this localization approach,...

The failure mechanism was determined to be tin whiskers emanating from the tin plating on the internal pins. The high conductivity, pure tin crystalline whiskers bridged the 10-mil spark gap to cause the test failures. The fusing current of the whiskers was in the range of the source current of the test equipment. This caused inconsistencies during problem identification and verification at the...

In their natural environment, rodents use their whiskers to locate and distinguish between objects of different textures and shapes. They do so by moving their whiskers actively as well as passively, through body and head movements. To determine the mechanisms by which surface coarseness is translated into neuronal discharges through passive whisker movements, we monitored head movements of awa...

Article history: Received 22 May 2017 Received in revised form 7 July 2017 Accepted 8 July 2017 Available online 19 July 2017 Tin and tin-alloyed electroplated films are known to be susceptible to whisker growth under a range of conditions,manyofwhich result in the generation of compressive stresses in thefilm. Compressive stress is considered to be one of the primary causes for whisker nucleat...