New disinfection methods include a persistent antimicrobial coating that can be applied to inanimate and animate objects (Surfacine), a high-level disinfectant with reduced exposure time (ortho-phthalaldehyde), and an antimicrobial agent that can be applied to animate and inanimate objects (superoxidized water). New sterilization methods include a chemical sterilization process for endoscopes t...

In the not too distant future, new materials for sensing and actuation, together with high-density, low-power electronics and embedded computation, will bring interaction and intelligence to commonplace inanimate objects in our environment. As a simple but illustrative example, we have built balloons that can interact conversationally. This paper describes this system: the piezoelectric foil th...

BACKGROUND How do we estimate time when watching an action? The idea that events are timed by a centralized clock has recently been called into question in favour of distributed, specialized mechanisms. Here we provide evidence for a critical specialization: animate and inanimate events are separately timed by humans. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS In different experiments, observers were ask...

Delusional doubling of inanimate objects, resembling the Capgras delusion was encountered in two cases of preexisting psychoses. This uncommon clinical feature is described and discussed.

Simple geometric shapes moving in a self-propelled manner, and violating Newtonian laws of motion by acting against gravitational forces tend to induce a judgement that an object is animate. Objects that change their motion only due to external causes are more likely judged as inanimate. How the developing brain is employed in the perception of animacy in early ontogeny is currently unknown. Th...

Infants as young as 5 months of age view familiar actions such as reaching as goal-directed (Woodward, 1998), but how do they construe the goal of an actor's reach? Six experiments investigated whether 12-month-old infants represent reaching actions as directed to a particular individual object, to a narrowly defined object category (e.g., an orange dump truck), or to a more broadly defined obj...

Human infants have considerable understanding of why objects move and what causes them to take one trajectory over another. Here, we explore the possibility that this capacity is shared with other nonhumans and present results from preferential looking time tests with a New World monkey, the cotton-top tamarin. Experiments examined whether individuals form different expectations about an object...