We report the temperature dependence of thermopower (S) in the ab plane of Bi2Sr2Co2O9 ~BC-222! single crystalline whiskers under high pressure up to 1.2 GPa. Special modifications were made to our high-pressure transport measurement system to improve the measurement accuracy of S for whiskers with high resistance. Pressure improved the contact resistance dramatically. We observed a slight decr...

In this paper, we present a first series of experiments with prototype artificial whiskers that have been developed in our laboratory. These experiments have been inspired by neuroscience research on real rats. In spite of the enormous potential of whiskers, they have to date not been systematically investigated and exploited by roboticists. Although the transduction mechanism is simple and str...

In rats, whisker trimming during development leads to persistent alterations in the function of cortical barrel circuits and to behavioral deficits later in life. Here we examined how whisker trimming begun either at birth (P0) or on postnatal day 12 (P12), around the onset of whisking behavior, affects receptive fields of layer IV barrel neurons. All whiskers on the left face were trimmed for ...

Whiskers have recently received an increasing interest as touch sensors capable of providing rich information about the close environment of an agent. Many different animal species – especially rodents – heavily rely on them for tasks as varied as short-range navigation and object exploration. For roboticists, whiskers are not only interesting because of the unique physical process on which the...

Rodents excel in making texture judgments by sweeping their whiskers across a surface. Here we aimed to identify the signals present in whisker vibrations that give rise to such fine sensory discriminations. First, we used sensors to capture vibration signals in metal whiskers during active whisking of an artificial system and in natural whiskers during whisking of rats in vivo. Then we develop...

Distress-mediated tissue oxidative stress was examined as a model of sub-healthy condition defined in traditional Chinese medicine theory. Mice were subjected to psychologically stressful conditions by whiskers removal. Under this condition, spontaneous locomotive activity was significantly enhanced in the dark (P < 0.05 versus the control mice in three different movements), and granulocytes/ly...

A system is described that delivers complex, biologically realistic, tactile stimuli to the rat's facial whisker pad by independently stimulating up to 16 individual facial whiskers in a flexible yet highly controlled and repeatable manner. The system is technically simple and inexpensive to construct. The system consists of an array of 16 miniature-solenoid driven actuators that are attached t...

The recent interest in nanotechnology has triggered research on nanofibers and nanostructures. Here we present our work on fiber-based multifunctional materials including nanofibers obtained via electrospinning processes. Such nanofibers are of potential value given the highly porous structures they form and their large surface area-to-volume ratio which is often required in high performance ap...