Intracranial recordings reveal high-frequency activity in the human temporal-parietal cortex supporting non-literal language processing.

Objective: Non-literal expressions such as sarcasm, metaphor and simile refer to words and sentences that convey meanings or intentions that are different and more abstract than literal expressions. Neuroimaging studies have shown activations in a variety of frontal, parietal and temporal brain regions implicated in non-literal language processing. However, neurophysiological correlates of these brain areas underlying non-literal processing remain underexplored.

Phosphorus quantification in soil using LIBS assisted by laser-induced fluorescence.

Quantification and monitoring of phosphorus in soil plays a critical role in environmentally friendly agriculture, especially in mitigation of phosphorus leakages to water systems and subsequent risk for eutrophication. On the other hand, deficiency in phosphorus would lead to problems in development and growth of cultivated crops. Therefore, monitoring and quantification of phosphorus status in soil is essential.

Human EEG and Recurrent Neural Networks Exhibit Common Temporal Dynamics During Speech Recognition.

Recent deep-learning artificial neural networks have shown remarkable success in recognizing natural human speech, however the reasons for their success are not entirely understood. Success of these methods might be because state-of-the-art networks use recurrent layers or dilated convolutional layers that enable the network to use a time-dependent feature space. The importance of time-dependent features in human cortical mechanisms of speech perception, measured by electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), have also been of particular recent interest.

Brain electrical dynamics in speech segmentation depends upon prior experience with the language.

It remains unclear whether the process of speech tracking, which facilitates speech segmentation, reflects top-down mechanisms related to prior linguistic models or stimulus-driven mechanisms, or possibly both. To address this, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) responses from native and non-native speakers of English that had different prior experience with the English language but heard acoustically identical stimuli. Despite a significant difference in the ability to segment and perceive speech, our EEG results showed that theta-band tracking of the speech envelope did not depend significantly on prior experience with language.

The effects of periodic interruptions on cortical entrainment to speech.

Speech is perceived as a continuous stream of words despite consisting of a discontinuous, quasi-periodic signal of interleaved sounds and silences. Speech perception is surprisingly robust to interference by interruption, however speech that is replaced by gaps of silence is difficult to understand. When those silences are filled with noise, the speech is once again perceived as continuous even when the underlying speech sounds are removed completely.

Swelling behavior of cross-linked dextran hydrogels and preliminary Gliclazide release behavior.

In this study, dextran (Dex) has been cross-linked with epichlorohydrin (Ech) to yield cross-linked hydrogels. These gels were characterized by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis, Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), and Scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The water absorption behavior of gels was studied in simulating gastric fluid (SGF) and simulating intestinal fluid (SIF) at 37°C.

Controlled release of anti-diabetic drug Gliclazide from poly(caprolactone)/poly(acrylic acid) hydrogels.

Drug Gliclazide (Glz) has limited solubility and low bioavailability. In order to obtain a controlled release of this drug and to improve its bioavailability, the drug has been loaded into poly(caprolactone) (PCL)/poly(acrylic acid) (PAAc) hydrogels, prepared by free radical polymerization of acrylic acid in the presence of poly(caprolactone) in acetone medium using azo-isobutyronitrile as initiator and N,N' methylene bisacrylamide as cross-linking agent. The swelling behaviour of these hydrogels has been investigated in the physiological gastric and intestinal fluids to obtain an optimum composition suitable for delivery of a biologically active compound.

The case of the neglected alphasyllabary: orthographic processing in Devanagari.

We applaud Ram Frost for highlighting the need for multicultural perspectives while developing universal models of visual word recognition. We second Frost's proposal that factors like lexical morphology should be incorporated besides purely orthographic features in modeling word recognition. In support, we provide fresh evidence from Hindi (written in Devanagari), an example of hitherto under-represented alphasyllabic orthographies, in which flexible encoding of aksara (character) position is constrained by the morphological structure of words.