Locating Nesting Sites for Critically Endangered Galápagos Pink Land Iguanas (Conolophus marthae).

Invasive alien species control is recognized worldwide as a priority action to preserve global biodiversity. However, a lack of general life history knowledge for threatened species can impede the effectiveness of conservation actions. Galápagos pink land iguanas (Conolophus marthae) are endemic to Wolf Volcano, Galápagos, Ecuador. These iguanas are threatened by invasive alien species, particularly feral cats, that may affect their small population size. To guarantee the long-term survival of C. marthae, the Galápagos National Park Directorate is considering, along with an ongoing campaign of feral cat control, the implementation of a head-start program. However, the success of this management strategy necessarily relies on the identification of pink iguana nesting grounds, which were still unknown at the onset of this study. We modeled the movement patterns of male and female iguanas during the reproductive season, using location data collected from custom-made remote tracking devices installed on adult pink iguanas in April 2021. We first calculated for each individual the vector of distances from its starting location, which was defined as net displacement. We then used net displacement as the response variable in a generalized additive mixed model with day of the year as the predictor. Based on the hypothesis that males and females may behaviorally differ after mating, we looked for female-specific migratory behavior suggesting females were moving toward nesting areas. The results obtained confirmed our hypothesis, as females exhibited a distinct migratory behavior, reaching a small plateau area inside of Wolf Volcano's caldera and ca. 400 m below the volcano's northern rim. Moreover, once inside the caldera, females displayed a more aggregated distribution pattern. The movement data obtained allowed Galápagos National Park rangers to locate individual pink iguana nests and subsequently to sight and collect the first observed hatchlings of the species. This work constitutes a necessary baseline to perform dedicated studies of pink iguana nests and emerging hatchling iguanas, which is an essential step toward the development of an effective head-start program.

Cell Electrokinetic Fingerprint: A Novel Approach Based on Optically Induced Dielectrophoresis (ODEP) for In-Flow Identification of Single Cells.

A novel optically induced dielectrophoresis (ODEP) system that can operate under flow conditions is designed for automatic trapping of cells and subsequent induction of 2D multi-frequency cell trajectories. Like in a "ping-pong" match, two virtual electrode barriers operate in an alternate mode with varying frequencies of the input voltage. The so-derived cell motions are characterized via time-lapse microscopy, cell tracking, and state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, like the wavelet scattering transform (WST). As a cell-electrokinetic fingerprint, the dynamic of variation of the cell displacements happening, over time, is quantified in response to different frequency values of the induced electric field. When tested on two biological scenarios in the cancer domain, the proposed approach discriminates cellular dielectric phenotypes obtained, respectively, at different early phases of drug-induced apoptosis in prostate cancer (PC3) cells and for differential expression of the lectine-like oxidized low-density lipoprotein receptor-1 (LOX-1) transcript levels in human colorectal adenocarcinoma (DLD-1) cells. The results demonstrate increased discrimination of the proposed system and pose an additional basis for making ODEP-based assays addressing cancer heterogeneity for precision medicine and pharmacological research.

A methodological framework to assess the accuracy of virtual reality hand-tracking systems: A case study with the Meta Quest 2.

Optical markerless hand-tracking systems incorporated into virtual reality (VR) headsets are transforming the ability to assess fine motor skills in VR. This promises to have far-reaching implications for the increased applicability of VR across scientific, industrial, and clinical settings. However, so far, there are little data regarding the accuracy, delay, and overall performance of these types of hand-tracking systems. Here we present a novel methodological framework based on a fixed grid of targets, which can be easily applied to measure these systems' absolute positional error and delay. We also demonstrate a method to assess finger joint-angle accuracy. We used this framework to evaluate the Meta Quest 2 hand-tracking system. Our results showed an average fingertip positional error of 1.1cm, an average finger joint angle error of 9.6∘ and an average temporal delay of 45.0 ms. This methodological framework provides a powerful tool to ensure the reliability and validity of data originating from VR-based, markerless hand-tracking systems.

Crime, inequality and public health: a survey of emerging trends in urban data science.

Urban agglomerations are constantly and rapidly evolving ecosystems, with globalization and increasing urbanization posing new challenges in sustainable urban development well summarized in the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The advent of the digital age generated by modern alternative data sources provides new tools to tackle these challenges with spatio-temporal scales that were previously unavailable with census statistics. In this review, we present how new digital data sources are employed to provide data-driven insights to study and track (i) urban crime and public safety; (ii) socioeconomic inequalities and segregation; and (iii) public health, with a particular focus on the city scale.

Erratum: Touching with the eyes: Oculomotor self-touch induces illusory body ownership.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.106180.].

Touching with the eyes: Oculomotor self-touch induces illusory body ownership.

Self-touch plays a central role in the construction and plasticity of the bodily self. But which mechanisms support this role? Previous accounts emphasize the convergence of proprioceptive and tactile signals from the touching and the touched body parts. Here, we hypothesise that proprioceptive information is not necessary for self-touch modulation of body-ownership. Because eye movements do not rely on proprioceptive signals as limb movements do, we developed a novel oculomotor self-touch paradigm where voluntary eye movements generated corresponding tactile sensations. We then compared the effectiveness of eye versus hand self-touch movements in generating an illusion of owning a rubber hand. Voluntary oculomotor self-touch was as effective as hand-driven self-touch, suggesting that proprioception does not contribute to body ownership during self-touch. Self-touch may contribute to a unified sense of bodily self by binding voluntary actions toward our own body with their tactile consequences.

Skin properties and afferent density in the deterioration of tactile spatial acuity with age.

Tactile sensitivity is affected by age, as shown by the deterioration of spatial acuity assessed with the two-point discrimination task. This is assumed to be partly a result of age-related changes of the peripheral somatosensory system. In particular, in the elderly, the density of mechanoreceptive afferents decreases with age and the skin tends to become drier, less elastic and less stiff. To assess to what degree mechanoreceptor density, skin hydration, elasticity and stiffness can account for the deterioration of tactile spatial sensitivity observed in the elderly, several approaches were combined, including psychophysics, measurements of finger properties, modelling and simulation of the response of first-order tactile neurons. Psychophysics confirmed that the Elderly group has lower tactile acuity than the Young group. Correlation and commonality analysis showed that age was the most important factor in explaining decreases in behavioural performance. Biological elasticity, hydration and finger pad area were also involved. These results were consistent with the outcome of simulations showing that lower afferent density and lower Young's modulus (i.e. lower stiffness) negatively affected the tactile encoding of stimulus information. Simulations revealed that these changes resulted in a lower build-up of task-relevant stimulus information. Importantly, the reduction in discrimination performance with age in the simulation was less than that observed in the psychophysical testing, indicating that there are additional peripheral as well as central factors responsible for age-related changes in tactile discrimination. KEY POINTS: Ageing effects on tactile perception involve the deterioration of spatial sensitivity, although the contribution of central and peripheral factors is not clear. We combined psychophysics, measurements of finger properties, modelling and simulation of the response of first-order tactile neurons to investigate to what extent skin elasticity, stiffness, hydration, finger pad area and afferent density can account for the lower spatial sensitivity observed in the elderly. Correlation and commonality analysis revealed that age was the most important factor to predict behavioural performance. Skin biological elasticity, hydration and finger pad area contributed to a lesser extent. The simulation of first-order tactile neuron responses indicated that reduction in afferent density plays a major role in the deterioration of tactile spatial acuity. Simulations also showed that lower skin stiffness and lower afferent density affect the build-up of stimulus information and the response of SA1 (i.e. type 1 slowly adapting fibres) and RA1 (i.e. type 1 rapidly adapting fibres) afferent fibres.

Generating mobility networks with generative adversarial networks.

The increasingly crucial role of human displacements in complex societal phenomena, such as traffic congestion, segregation, and the diffusion of epidemics, is attracting the interest of scientists from several disciplines. In this article, we address mobility network generation, i.e., generating a city's entire mobility network, a weighted directed graph in which nodes are geographic locations and weighted edges represent people's movements between those locations, thus describing the entire mobility set flows within a city. Our solution is MoGAN, a model based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate realistic mobility networks. We conduct extensive experiments on public datasets of bike and taxi rides to show that MoGAN outperforms the classical Gravity and Radiation models regarding the realism of the generated networks. Our model can be used for data augmentation and performing simulations and what-if analysis.

Skin and Mechanoreceptor Contribution to Tactile Input for Perception: A Review of Simulation Models.

We review four current computational models that simulate the response of mechanoreceptors in the glabrous skin to tactile stimulation. The aim is to inform researchers in psychology, sensorimotor science and robotics who may want to implement this type of quantitative model in their research. This approach proves relevant to understanding of the interaction between skin response and neural activity as it avoids some of the limitations of traditional measurement methods of tribology, for the skin, and neurophysiology, for tactile neurons. The main advantage is to afford new ways of looking at the combined effects of skin properties on the activity of a population of tactile neurons, and to examine different forms of coding by tactile neurons. Here, we provide an overview of selected models from stimulus application to neuronal spiking response, including their evaluation in terms of existing data, and their applicability in relation to human tactile perception.

Modeling international mobility using roaming cell phone traces during COVID-19 pandemic.

Most of the studies related to human mobility are focused on intra-country mobility. However, there are many scenarios (e.g., spreading diseases, migration) in which timely data on international commuters are vital. Mobile phones represent a unique opportunity to monitor international mobility flows in a timely manner and with proper spatial aggregation. This work proposes using roaming data generated by mobile phones to model incoming and outgoing international mobility. We use the gravity and radiation models to capture mobility flows before and during the introduction of non-pharmaceutical interventions. However, traditional models have some limitations: for instance, mobility restrictions are not explicitly captured and may play a crucial role. To overtake such limitations, we propose the COVID Gravity Model (CGM), namely an extension of the traditional gravity model that is tailored for the pandemic scenario. This proposed approach overtakes, in terms of accuracy, the traditional models by 126.9% for incoming mobility and by 63.9% when modeling outgoing mobility flows.

Age-related sensory neuropathy in patients with spinal muscular atrophy type 1.

INTRODUCTION/AIMS: Spinal muscular atrophy type 1 (SMA 1) is a devastating motor neuron disorder that leads to progressive muscle weakness, respiratory failure and premature death. Although sensory electrophysiological changes have been anecdotally found in pediatric SMA 1 patients, the age of onset of sensory neuropathy remains unknown. METHODS: Sensory nerve conduction studies of the median and sural nerves were performed in 28 consecutive SMA 1 patients of different ages. Sensory nerve conduction velocities and sensory nerve action potential (SNAP) amplitudes recorded in these patients were compared with those obtained from 93 healthy subjects stratified by age. RESULTS: SNAP amplitudes decreased with increasing age in the sural and median nerves, without any significant difference between upper and lower limbs. DISCUSSION: Our data suggest that sural and median nerve SNAP amplitudes are normal in younger patients, while an axonal neuropathy appears in older ones.

Tactile Echoes: Multisensory Augmented Reality for the Hand.

Touch interactions are central to many human activities, but there are few technologies for computationally augmenting free-hand interactions with real environments. Here, we describe Tactile Echoes, a finger-wearable system for augmenting touch interactions with physical objects. This system captures and processes touch-elicited vibrations in real-time in order to enliven tactile experiences. In this article, we process these signals via a parametric signal processing network in order to generate responsive tactile and auditory feedback. Just as acoustic echoes are produced through the delayed replication and modification of sounds, so are Tactile Echoes produced through transformations of vibrotactile inputs in the skin. The echoes also reflect the contact interactions and touched objects involved. A transient tap produces discrete echoes, while a continuous slide yields sustained feedback. We also demonstrate computational and spatial tracking methods that allow these effects to be selectively assigned to different objects or actions. A large variety of distinct multisensory effects can be designed via ten processing parameters. We investigated how Tactile Echoes are perceived in several perceptual experiments using multidimensional scaling methods. This allowed us to deduce low-dimensional, semantically grounded perceptual descriptions. We present several virtual and augmented reality applications of Tactile Echoes. In a user study, we found that these effects made interactions more responsive and engaging. Our findings show how to endow a large variety of touch interactions with expressive multisensory effects.

Static Weight Perception Through Skin Stretch and Kinesthetic Information: Detection Thresholds, JNDs, and PSEs.

We examined the contributions of kinesthetic and skin stretch cues to static weight perception. In three psychophysical experiments, several aspects of static weight perception were assessed by asking participants either to detect on which hand a weight was presented or to compare between two weight cues. Two closed-loop controlled haptic devices were used to present cutaneous and kinesthetic weights, in isolation and together, with a precision of 0.05 g. Our results show that combining skin stretch and kinesthetic information leads to better weight detection thresholds than presenting uni-sensory cues does. For supra-threshold stimuli, Weber fractions were 22-44%. Kinesthetic information was less reliable for lighter weights, while both sources of information were equally reliable for weights up to 300 g. Weight was perceived as equally heavy regardless of whether skin stretch and kinesthetic cues were presented together or alone. Data for lighter weights complied with an Optimal Integration model, while for heavier weights, measurements were closer to predictions from a Sensory Capture model. The presence of correlated noise might explain this discrepancy, since that would shift predictions from the Optimal Integration model towards our measurements. Our experiments provide device-independent perceptual measures, and can be used to inform, for instance, skin stretch device design.

Lead sulphide colloidal quantum dots for room temperature NO2 gas sensors.

Colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) have been recently investigated as promising building blocks for low-cost and high-performance gas sensors due to their large effective surface-to-volume ratio and their suitability for versatile functionalization through surface chemistry. In this work we report on lead sulphide CQDs based sensors for room temperature NO2 detection. The sensor response has been measured for different pollutant gases including NO2, CH4, CO and CO2 and for different concentrations in the 2.8-100 ppm range. For the first time, the influence of the QDs film thickness on the sensor response has been investigated and optimized. Upon 30 ppm NO2 release, the best room temperature gas response is about 14 Ω/Ω, with response and recovery time of 12 s and 26 min, respectively. A detection limit of about 0.15 ppb was estimated from the slope of the sensor response and its electric noise. The gas sensors exhibit high sensitivity to NO2, remarkable selectivity, repeatability and full recovery after exposure.

Causality shifts the perceived temporal order of audiovisual events.

Causality poses explicit constraints to the timing of sensory signals produced by events, as sound travels slower than light, making auditory stimulation to lag visual stimulation. Previous studies show that implied causality between unrelated events can change the tolerance of simultaneity judgments for audiovisual asynchronies. Here, we tested whether apparent causality between audiovisual events may also affect their perceived temporal order. To this aim, we used a disambiguated stream-bounce display, with stimuli either bouncing or streaming upon each other. These two possibilities were accompanied by a sound played around the time of contact between the objects, which could be perceived as causally related to the visual event according to the condition. Participants reported whether the visual contact occurred before or after the sound. Our results show that when the audiovisual stimuli are consistent with a causal interpretation (i.e., the bounce caused the sound), their perceived temporal order is systematically biased. Namely, a stimulus dynamic consistent with a causal relation induces a perceptual delay in the audio component, even if the sound was presented first. We thus conclude that causality can systematically bias the perceived temporal order of events, possibly due to expectations based on the dynamics of events in the real world. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Contact forces in roughness discrimination.

Roughness perception through fingertip contact with a textured surface can involve spatial and temporal cues from skin indentation and vibration respectively. Both types of cue may be affected by contact forces when feeling a surface and we ask whether, on a given trial, discrimination performance relates to contact forces. We examine roughness discrimination performance in a standard psychophysical method (2-interval forced choice, in which the participant identifies which of two spatial textures formed by parallel grooves feels rougher) while continuously measuring the normal and tangential forces applied by the index finger. Fourteen participants discriminated spatial gratings in fine (spatial period of 320-580 micron) and coarse (1520-1920 micron) ranges using static pressing or sliding contact of the index finger. Normal contact force (mean and variability) during pressing or sliding had relatively little impact on accuracy of roughness judgments except when pressing on surfaces in the coarse range. Discrimination was better for sliding than pressing in the fine but not the coarse range. In contrast, tangential force fluctuations during sliding were strongly related to roughness judgment accuracy.

The Design of an Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Node for Tracking Pink Iguanas.

The design of wireless sensor nodes for animal tracking is a multidisciplinary activity that presents several research challenges both from a technical and a biological point of view. A monitoring device has to be designed accounting for all system requirements including the specific characteristics of animals and environment. In this work we present some aspects of the design of a wireless sensor node to track and monitor the pink iguana of the Galápagos: a recently discovered species living in remote locations at the Galápagos Islands. The few individuals of this species live in a relatively small area that lacks of any available communication infrastructure. We present and discuss the energy harvesting architecture and the related energy management logic. We also discuss the impact of packaging on the sensor performance and the consequences of the limited available energy on the GPS tracking.

Peri-personal space as a prior in coupling visual and proprioceptive signals.

It has been suggested that the integration of multiple body-related sources of information within the peri-personal space (PPS) scaffolds body ownership. However, a normative computational framework detailing the functional role of PPS is still missing. Here we cast PPS as a visuo-proprioceptive Bayesian inference problem whereby objects we see in our environment are more likely to engender sensations as they come near to the body. We propose that PPS is the reflection of such an increased a priori probability of visuo-proprioceptive coupling that surrounds the body. To test this prediction, we immersed participants in a highly realistic virtual reality (VR) simulation of their right arm and surrounding environment. We asked participants to perform target-directed reaches toward visual, proprioceptive, and visuo-proprioceptive targets while visually displaying their reaching arm (body visible condition) or not (body invisible condition). Reach end-points are analyzed in light of the coupling prior framework, where the extension of PPS is taken to be represented by the spatial dispersion of the coupling prior between visual and proprioceptive estimates of arm location. Results demonstrate that if the body is not visible, the spatial dispersion of the visuo-proprioceptive coupling relaxes, whereas the strength of coupling remains stable. By demonstrating a distance-dependent alteration in visual and proprioceptive localization attractive pull toward one another (stronger pull at small spatial discrepancies) when the body is rendered invisible - an effect that is well accounted for by the visuo-proprioceptive coupling prior - the results suggest that the visible body grounds visuo-proprioceptive coupling preferentially in the near vs. far space.

An experimental setup to test dual-joystick directional responses to vibrotactile stimuli.

In this paper we investigate the influence of the location of vibrotactile stimulation in triggering the response made using two handheld joysticks. In particular, we compare performance with stimuli delivered either using tactors placed on the palm or on the back of the hand and with attractive (move toward the vibration) or repulsive prompts (move away from the vibration). The experimental set-up comprised two joysticks and two gloves, each equipped with four pager motors along the cardinal directions. In different blocks, fifty-three volunteers were asked to move the joysticks as fast as possible either towards or away with respect to the direction specified by a set of vibrating motors. Results indicate that participants performed better with attractive prompts (i.e. responses were faster and with fewer errors in conditions where participants were asked to move the joysticks in the direction of the felt vibration) and that the stimulation delivered on the back of the hand from the gloves gives better results than the stimulation on the palm delivered by the joysticks. Finally, we analyse the laterality, the relation between correct responses and reaction times, the direction patterns for wrong responses and we perform an analysis on the Stimulus-Response Compatibility and on the training effect.