Electrophysiological Correlates of Amplified Emotion-Related Cognitive Processing Evoked by Self-Administered Disgust Images.

In the processing of emotions, the brain prepares and reacts in distinctive manners depending upon the negative or positive nuance of the emotion elicitors. Previous investigations showed that negative elicitors generally evoke more intense neural activities than positive and neutral ones, as reflected in the augmented amplitude of all sub-components of the event-related potentials (ERP) late posterior positivity (LPP) complex, while less is known about the emotion of disgust. The present study aimed to examine whether the LPP complex during the processing of disgust stimuli showed greater amplitude than other emotion elicitors with negative or positive valences, thus confirming it as a neural marker of disgust-related negativity bias at earlier or later stages.

Cell orientation under stretch: A review of experimental findings and mathematical modelling.

The key role of electro-chemical signals in cellular processes had been known for many years, but more recently the interplay with mechanics has been put in evidence and attracted substantial research interests. Indeed, the sensitivity of cells to mechanical stimuli coming from the microenvironment turns out to be relevant in many biological and physiological circumstances. In particular, experimental evidence demonstrated that cells on elastic planar substrates undergoing periodic stretches, mimicking native cyclic strains in the tissue where they reside, actively reorient their cytoskeletal stress fibres.

Coupling solid and fluid stresses with brain tumour growth and white matter tract deformations in a neuroimaging-informed model.

Brain tumours are among the deadliest types of cancer, since they display a strong ability to invade the surrounding tissues and an extensive resistance to common therapeutic treatments. It is therefore important to reproduce the heterogeneity of brain microstructure through mathematical and computational models, that can provide powerful instruments to investigate cancer progression. However, only a few models include a proper mechanical and constitutive description of brain tissue, which instead may be relevant to predict the progression of the pathology and to analyse the reorganization of healthy tissues occurring during tumour growth and, possibly, after surgical resection.