Marine invertebrates exhibit both chemokinesis and chemotaxis phenomena, induced in most cases by the release of water-borne peptides or pheromones. In mollusks, several peptides released during egg-laying improve both male attraction and mating. Unlike other cephalopods, Octopus vulgaris adopts an indirect internal fertilization strategy. We here report on the identification and characterizati...

Auditory nerve fibers are the major source of excitation to the three groups of principal cells of the ventral cochlear nucleus (VCN), bushy, T stellate, and octopus cells. Shock-evoked excitatory postsynaptic currents (eEPSCs) in slices from mice showed systematic differences between groups of principal cells, indicating that target cells contribute to determining pre- and postsynaptic propert...

Octopus arms house 200-300 independently controlled suckers that can alternately afford an octopus fine manipulation of small objects and produce high adhesion forces on virtually any non-porous surface. Octopuses use their suckers to grasp, rotate and reposition soft objects (e.g., octopus eggs) without damaging them and to provide strong, reversible adhesion forces to anchor the octopus to ha...

OBJECTIVE To determine in vivo efficacy of radiofrequency ablation (RFA) in porcine liver by using 15-gauge Octopus® (15-G Octopus®) electrodes to create a large coagulation. MATERIALS AND METHODS A total of 18 coagulations were created by using a 180-W generator and 15-G Octopus® electrodes during laparotomy, performed in 14 pigs. Coagulation necrosis was created in the pig livers by the use...

The first encounter with a live male blanket octopus, Tremoctopus violaceus Chiaie, 1830, illustrates the most extreme example of sexual size-dimorphism in a non-microscopic animal. Females attain sizes of up to 2 m long—almost 2 orders of magnitude larger than the 2.4-cm-long male. Weight ratios between the sexes are at least 10 000:1 and are likely to reach 40 000:1. Sexual selection and the ...

The dynamic model of the octopus arm described in the first paper of this 2-part series was used here to investigate the neural strategies used for controlling the reaching movements of the octopus arm. These are stereotypical extension movements used to reach toward an object. In the dynamic model, sending a simple propagating neural activation signal to contract all muscles along the arm prod...

Living under intense predation pressure, octopuses evolved an effective and impressive camouflaging ability that exploits features of their surroundings to enable them to "blend in." To achieve such background matching, an animal may use general resemblance and reproduce characteristics of its entire surroundings, or it may imitate a specific object in its immediate environment. Using image ana...

Several species of octopus are considered venomous due to toxins present in the glands connected to their “beak”, which may be associated with hunt and kill of prey. Herein, we report an accident involving a common octopus (Octopus vulgaris) that injured an instructor during a practical biology lesson and provoked an inflamed infiltrated plaque on the hand of the victim. The lesion was present ...

Non-volatile memory (NVM) and remote direct memory access (RDMA) provide extremely high performance in storage and network hardware. However, existing distributed file systems strictly isolate file system and network layers, and the heavy layered software designs leave high-speed hardware under-exploited. In this paper, we propose an RDMA-enabled distributed persistent memory file system, Octop...