Conductive hearing loss (CHL) is known to produce hearing deficits, including deficits in sound localization ability. The differences in sound intensities and timing experienced between the two tympanic membranes are important cues to sound localization (ILD and ITD, respectively). Although much is known about the effect of CHL on hearing ...

Hunter-Schreger bands are an optical phenomenon observed in mammalian tooth enamel. Familiar to all current and former students of dental histology, this optical phenomenon appears as alternating patterns of dark and light bands when cut enamel is viewed under reflected light. The discovery of this important feature of mammalian enamel ...

γ-band oscillations are thought to play a crucial role in information processing in cortical networks. In addition to oscillatory activity between 30 and 60 Hz, current evidence from electro- and magnetoencephalography (EEG/MEG) and local-field potentials (LFPs) has consistently shown oscillations >60 Hz (high γ-band) whose function and generating mechanisms are unclear. In ...

The damped-oscillator pseudo-wavelet is presented as a method of time-frequency analysis along with a new spectral density measure, the data power. An instantaneous phase can be defined for this pseudo-wavelet, and it is easily inverted. The data power measure is tested on both computer generated data and in vivo intrahippocampal ...

The present study examined the relative influence of the off- and on-frequency spectral components of modulated and unmodulated maskers on consonant recognition. Stimuli were divided into 30 contiguous equivalent rectangular bandwidths. The temporal fine structure (TFS) in each "target" band was either left intact or replaced with tones using vocoder ...

The double-pulse resolution (DPR) measures the processing performance for transient visual signals as the threshold duration for detecting a temporal gap between two light flashes in relation to gap duration. The DPR of four European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) and four humans was measured in an operant Go/NoGo procedure. We applied ...

We study the linear discrete diffraction characteristics of light in two-dimensional backbone lattices. It is found that, as the refractive index modulation depth of the backbone lattice increases, high-order band gaps become open and broad in sequence, and the allowed band curves of the Floquet-Bloch modes become flat gradually. As ...

A small band-gap carbon nanotube (SBG CNT) with a large diameter of 4 nm has been used to fabricate ambipolar field-effect transistors (FETs) with ultrahigh carrier mobility of more than 18 300 and 8300 cm(2)/V x s for holes and electrons, respectively. Using a top-gate device geometry with 12 nm ...

We investigated what is really meant by so-called positional or frequency fluctuation of spectral features. To show the difference between the true frequency shift of a single band and apparent peak maximum shift caused by relative intensity changes of overlapped adjacent bands, we analyzed infrared (IR) spectra of the OH ...

The frequency profiles and time courses of oscillatory changes when reading words are not fully understood, although there have been many reports that oscillatory dynamics reflect local brain function. In order to clarify oscillatory dynamics, we investigated the frequency and spatiotemporal distributions of neuromagnetic activities during silent reading of words ...

Multiple concurrently presented stimuli are thought to compete for neuronal processing resources. Such competitive stimulus interactions can be investigated by "frequency tagging" each stimulus with an individual temporal frequency. In this case, all stimuli will drive distinct steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs), hence allowing for an assessment of the distribution ...

EPR linewidth measurements of 2,N-(4-n-butyl benzilidene) 4-amino 2,2,6,6-tetramethyl piperidine 1-oxide (BBTMPO) in toluene at 1 GHz (L-Band), 4 GHz (S-Band), 9 GHz (X-Band) and 34 GHz (Q-Band) microwave frequencies indicate the presence of a distribution of relaxation times. The empirical response parameter introduced by Cole-Davidson for the analysis of dielectric ...

We report the demonstration of single-nanowire photodetectors relying on carrier generation in GaN/AlN QDiscs. Two nanowire samples containing QDiscs of different thicknesses are analyzed and compared to a reference binary n-i-n GaN nanowire sample. The responsivity of a single wire QDisc detector is as high as 2 x 10(3) A/W ...

We report new results about the improvement of delay-bandwidth product in photonic crystal slow light waveguides. Previous studies have obtained large delay-bandwidth product at the price of small average group index. It is pointed out here that the radius and the distance between the two boundary rows of holes have ...

In this paper, evidence is provided that Chilean dolphins (Cephalorhynchus eutropia) produce ultrasonic echolocation clicks of the narrow-band high-frequency category. Echolocation clicks emitted during approaches of the hydrophones consisted only of narrow-band (rms-BW: 12.0 kHz) single pulses with mean centroid frequencies of about 126 kHz, peak frequencies of 126 kHz, ...

Cortical oscillatory activity in the gamma-band range (>30Hz) is a fundamental mechanism of neural coding that arises during a range of cognitive processes in both animals and humans. Since the first report on high frequency oscillatory synchrony between V1 neurons belonging to the same orientation column (Gray and Singer, 1989, ...

The second of two consecutively presented sounds may be perceived as being longer than if that sound had been presented in isolation. We performed five experiments using heterophonic patterns in which a sine tone was preceded by a frequency-band noise. We observed significant overestimations of sine-tone duration, the size of ...

This study examined the redundancy of spectral and temporal information in everyday sentences, which were reduced to 16 rectangular spectral bands having center frequencies ranging from 250 to 8000 Hz, spaced at 1/3 octave intervals. High-order filtering eliminated contributions from transition bands, and the widths of the resulting effectively rectangular ...

We investigated the potential benefits for consonant identification of a form of frequency transposition intended for people with severe or profound hearing loss at high frequencies, but near-normal hearing at low frequencies. Frequency components from a 'source band' in a high-frequency region were transposed downwards to a 'destination band'. All ...

Echolocation clicks were recorded from an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin Tursiops truncatus trained to discriminate frequency filtered phantom targets in 1998 and in 2004. These clicks showed consistency within their spectra intensity profiles but only in a certain band of frequencies. In 2004 almost all the clicks were consistent within the ...

Through the use of a strategy that involves narrowing the TiO(2) band gap by shifting its conduction band positively and utilizing the catalytic activity of photoproduced Cu(I) for oxygen reduction, a novel visible-light-sensitive TiO(2) photocatalyst, Cu(II)-grafted Ti(1-3x)W(x)Ga(2x)O(2), was designed and synthesized. The Cu(II)/Ti(1-3x)W(x)Ga(2x)O(2) photocatalyst produced high activity under visible-light irradiation. ...

Speech stimuli give rise to neural activity in the listener that can be observed as waveforms using magnetoencephalography. Although waveforms vary greatly from trial to trial due to activity unrelated to the stimulus, it has been demonstrated that spoken sentences can be discriminated based on theta-band (3-7 Hz) phase patterns ...

Characterizing how different cortical rhythms interact and how their interaction changes with sensory stimulation is important to gather insights into how these rhythms are generated and what sensory function they may play. Concepts from information theory, such as Transfer Entropy (TE), offer principled ways to quantify the amount of causation ...

Studies analyzing sensory cortical processing or trying to decode brain activity often rely on a combination of different electrophysiological signals, such as local field potentials (LFPs) and spiking activity. Understanding the relation between these signals and sensory stimuli and between different components of these signals is hence of great interest. ...

We find that the angle between elementary lattice vectors obviously affects the bandwidth and dispersion of slow light in photonic crystal line-defect waveguides. When the fluctuation of group index is strictly limited in a +/-1% range, the oblique lattice structures with the angle between elementary lattice vectors slightly larger than ...

We demonstrate a novel type of slow light photonic crystal waveguide which can produce unusual "U" type group index - frequency curves with constant group index n(g) over large bandwidth. By shifting the boundaries of this waveguide, flexible control of n(g) (10 <n(g)< 210) with large bandwidth (1nm<Deltalambda<43nm centered at ...

We present the experimental visualization of covalent bonding, positional disorders and split anion sites in visible-light responsive photocatalyst (Ga(0.885)Zn(0.115))(N(0.885)O(0.115)). ZnO alloying into GaN reduces the band gap, leading to the visible-light response. DFT calculations indicated no significant difference in band gap between structural models with and without split sites.

In this paper, we investigate the spectral characteristics of normal incident light reflected by a multilayered structure composed of an alternated sequence of single-pitch cholesteric liquid-crystal (ChLC) and anisotropic layers. Using the Berreman 4x4 matrix formalism, we numerically obtain the reflection spectrum and the chromaticity diagram as a function of ...

The present study evaluated the relative contribution of various regions of the frequency spectrum to consonant recognition in normal-hearing listeners. The method used in this study was specifically designed to provide an estimate of the importance of each band (i) consistent with the frequency resolution of the auditory system and ...

This study examined the redundancy of spectral and temporal information in everyday sentences, which were reduced to 16 rectangular spectral bands having center frequencies ranging from 250 to 8000 Hz, spaced at 13-octave intervals. High-order filtering eliminated contributions from transition bands, and the widths of the resulting effectively rectangular speech ...

In normal hearing, the threshold of a tone masked by a modulated narrow-band on-frequency masker (OFB) can be reduced if correlated modulation is present on spectrally distant flanking bands (FBs), an effect known as comodulation masking release (CMR). Since electric hearing with current cochlear implants is based on envelope information, ...

Research using sine-wave speech suggests that across-formant grouping depends critically on modulation of the frequency but not the amplitude contours of the formants. The generality of this finding was explored using noise-vocoded sentences. Sentences were filtered into six frequency bands, and the amplitude envelope of each band was used to ...

This paper investigates the significance of the magnitude or the phase in the short term Fourier spectrum for speech intelligibility as a function of the time-window length. For a wide range of window lengths (1/16-2048 ms), two hybrid signals were obtained by a cross-wise combination of the magnitude and phase ...

Forward masking has been studied extensively, but the mechanism underlying forward masking is still being debated. The aim of this study was to understand the relative contribution of adaptation and temporal integration on forward masking. In the first experiment, gap detection thresholds were measured for symmetrical and asymmetrical noise markers ...

The localized coupling between piezoelectric and photoexcitation effects of a ZnO micro/nanowire device has been studied for the first time with the goal of designing and controlling the electrical transport characteristics of the device. The piezoelectric effect tends to raise the height of the local Schottky barrier (SB) at the ...

The effects of nonlinear interactions between different sound frequencies on the responses of neurons in primary auditory cortex (AI) have only been investigated using two-tone paradigms. Here we stimulated with relatively dense, Poisson-distributed trains of tone pips (with frequency ranges spanning five octaves, 16 frequencies /octave, and mean rates of ...

The purpose of this investigation was to compare kinetic and kinematic variables between squats performed with and without elastic bands equalized for total work. Ten recreationally weight trained males completed 1 set of 5 squats without (Wht) and with (Band) elastic bands as resistance. Squats were completed while standing on ...

This study investigated the usefulness of the very low spectral content of single-channel airflow recordings to help in the diagnosis of the obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) syndrome. Additionally, we evaluated whether airflow frequency components in the 0.01 - 0.10 Hz band are linked with desaturations in blood oxygen saturation (SaO(2)) ...

The goal of this study was to analyze the magnetoencephalogram (MEG) background activity in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) using a regularity measure: approximate entropy (ApEn). This measure was computed for a broad band (0.5-40 Hz) as well as typical frequency bands (delta, theta, alpha, beta and gamma). Five minutes ...

Face recognition is thought to rely more on the relative positions of face features (configural information) than on the appearance of the individual face parts (featural information). It also seems to rely on a specific band of spatial frequencies (SFs). In this study, we measured the SFs needed for processing ...

The aim of the study was to evaluate the morphological features of the mediopatellar and lateral folds in fetal knees in the absence of any exposure to certain stress factors such as exercise or trauma. The study was performed in the knee joints of 15 fetuses (6 males, 9 females) ...

The existing body of literature regarding the acoustic design of concert halls has focused almost exclusively on classical music, although there are many more performances of popular music, including rock and pop. Objective measurements were made of the acoustics of 20 rock music venues in Denmark and a questionnaire was ...

OBJECTIVES: To determine whether (1) the auditory N1 component can be elicited to gaps in continuous narrowband noises, (2) psychophysical and electrophysiological gap thresholds (PGTs and EGTs) are similar to one another, and (3) EGTs are the same for all narrowband noise center frequencies. DESIGN: PGTs and EGTs were obtained ...

"Noncompensated n-p codoping" is established as an enabling concept for enhancing the visible-light photoactivity of TiO2 by narrowing its band gap. The concept embodies two crucial ingredients: the electrostatic attraction within the n-p dopant pair enhances both the thermodynamic and kinetic solubilities, and the noncompensated nature ensures the creation of ...

Tone detection and temporal gap detection thresholds were determined in CBA/CaJ mice using a Go/No-go procedure and the psychophysical method of constant stimuli. In the first experiment, audiograms were constructed for five CBA/CaJ mice. Thresholds were obtained for eight pure tones ranging in frequency from 1 to 42 kHz. Audiograms ...

Comodulation masking release (CMR) has been attributed to auditory processing within one auditory channel (within-channel cues) and/or across several auditory channels (across-channel cues). The present flanking-band (FB) experiment-using a 25-Hz-wide on-frequency noise masker (OFM) centered at the signal frequency of 10 kHz and a single 25-Hz-wide noise FB-was designed to ...

A massive bloom of macroalgae occurred in the western Yellow Sea at the end of May, 2008, and lasted for nearly 2 months. The surface-drifting macroalgae was observed to accumulate in a pattern dominated by linear bands. The maximum length of individual algal bands exceeded 10 km and the distance ...

A special configuration of white-light scanning interferometer is described for measuring the absolute air gap thickness between two planar plates brought into close proximity. The measured gap is not located in any interference arm of the interferometer, but acts as an amplitude-and-phase modulator of the light source. Compared with the ...

Processing of silent gaps of the order of milliseconds is crucial in speech perception. To investigate such process, we compared gap detection for spectrally symmetrical, slightly or widely asymmetrical markers, using the mismatch negativity (MMN), an index of preattentive change detection in the brain. The slightly asymmetrical markers declined the ...

The choice of processing parameters for vocoded signals may have an important effect on the availability of various auditory features. Experiment 1 varied envelope cutoff frequency (30 and 300 Hz), carrier type (sine and noise), and number of bands (2-5) for vocoded speech presented to normal-hearing listeners. Performance was better ...