Effects of the IronHand Soft Exoskeleton on Forearm Muscle Activity During in Field Automotive Assembly Tasks.

OCCUPATIONAL APPLICATIONSWhen compared to not using a soft-hand exoskeleton, the IronHand caused both increases and decreases in forearm muscle activity while completing automotive assembly tasks. Surprisingly, although there were reductions in muscle activity when wearing the IronHand, only a few of these decreases resulted in muscle activity changing such that they fell to below recommended ergonomic thresholds. Despite this, some individuals in our study clearly benefited from the device, and this suggests that there is potential for widespread use of such a device if fine tuned to the individual and task demands.

Signatures of Ultralight Bosons in the Orbital Eccentricity of Binary Black Holes.

We show that the existence of clouds of ultralight particles surrounding black holes during their cosmological history as members of a binary system can leave a measurable imprint on the distribution of masses and orbital eccentricities observable with future gravitational-wave detectors. Notably, we find that for nonprecessing binaries with chirp masses M≲10M_{⊙}, formed exclusively in isolation, larger-than-expected values of the eccentricity, i.e.

Local in Time Conservative Binary Dynamics at Fourth Post-Minkowskian Order.

Leveraging scattering information to describe binary systems in generic orbits requires identifying local and nonlocal in time tail effects. We report here the derivation of the universal (nonspinning) local in time conservative dynamics at fourth post-Minkowskian order, i.e.

Food plants in Brazil: origin, economic value of pollination and pollinator shortage risk.

Pollination is a key ecosystem service of critical importance for food production. However, globally, several regions are already experiencing pollinator shortage as pollinators are declining. Here, we investigate the origin, pollinator dependence and economic value of 199 food crops cultivated in Brazil to understand to which extent (1) Brazilian agriculture is vulnerable to pollinator shortage, and (2) Brazilian society has already achieved a comprehensive perspective about crop dependence.

Emotional Value of Fear Memory and the Role of the Ventral Hippocampus in Systems Consolidation.

Recent studies have explored the circuitry involving the ventral hippocampus (vHPC), the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex, a pathway mainly activated to store contextual information efficiently. Lesions in the vHPC impair remote memory, but not in the short term. However, how the vHPC is affected by distinct memory strength or its role in systems consolidation has not yet been elucidated.