The concept of category from mathematics happens to be useful to computer programmers in many ways. Unfortunately, all"good"explanations of categories so far have been designed by mathematicians, or at least theoreticians with a strong background in mathematics, and this makes categories especially inscrutable to external audiences. More specifically, the common explanatory route to approach ca...

Cat scratch lesion of the gastrointestinal tract is a rare entity. It was first reported in the colon, in 2007 [1]. A few case reports of cat scratch colon were published in the English literature following the initial description of this entity [2–4]. Recently, a case was described of linear esophageal tears in a man, similar to the colonic cat scratch lesion [5]. We report the second case of ...

Most scientists do research to push the boundaries of knowledge. Press coverage is a happy (or unhappy) by-product of the process. But not so for scientists at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. When they set out to synthesize a polio virus from scratch, the point of the exercise was to garner public attention. Like George Leigh Mallory and Mt. Everest, they wanted to do it becaus...

During early ontogeny, stimuli that pose a threat to an animal change. Unrelated adult male rats may kill young rats, but infanticide ends around weaning. Predation, on the other hand, may increase during early ontogeny when rats begin to extend their activity range. We investigated the developmental course of two defensive responses, immobility and analgesia, in young rats exposed to an adult ...

The Scratch environment exemplifies a tool+community approach to teaching elementary programming skills, as it includes a website where users can publish, discuss, and organize animations that are programs. To explore this environment’s effectiveness for helping people to develop programming skills, we performed a quantitative analysis of 250 randomly-selected users’ data, including over 1000 o...

Cutaneous stimulation within the rostral scratch receptive field in a low spinal-immobilized turtle elicits a fictive rostral scratch reflex characterized by robust rhythmic motor output from ipsilateral hindlimb muscle nerves and weaker, alternating motor discharge in contralateral nerves. Simultaneous bilateral stimulation elicits bilateral rostral scratch motor patterns in which activity on ...

Practicing civil, mechanical, aerospace, petroleum and structural engineers are often faced with the complexity of evaluating the quality and integrity of new or existing structures. Recent academic research has demonstrated that instrumented scratch testing is a viable alternative for determining the strength and ductility of metals without the use of destructive methods involving the extracti...

Scratch-induced cracking is a serious problem for the use of glass products. At the scratch process, both median (vertical to the glass surface) and lateral (horizontal to the glass surface) cracks are formed. In this study, morphology of the scratch-induced cracks in a commercial soda-lime-silica glass was investigated by the scanning electron microscopy for the specimen broken across the scra...

Counterstimuli such as scratching, pinching, noxious heat and cold, and innocuous cooling and warming have been shown to inhibit itch in humans. In the present study, the effects of each of these counterstimuli were determined on baseline firing rates and on sustained pruriceptive responses of rat trigeminothalamic tract neurons. We found that scratching had little, if any, effect on baseline f...