The interoception and imagination loop in hypnotic phenomena.

We tested a working hypothesis that the ideomotor and motor-control suggestions measured by current hypnotizability scales depend on the activation of an interoception-imagination processing loop. In three experiments, participants were exposed to an induction phase, Items 3 (mosquito hallucination) and 8 (arm immobilization) of the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form C, and a new version of Item 8 involving the additional activation of imaginative and interoception processes. We found that this modified version of Item 8 elicited greater responsiveness to suggestion, irrespective of its position in the sequence of hypnotic items.

Pharmacotherapy for the peripartum management of bipolar disorder.

: The peripartum period in bipolar disorder (BD) patients is associated with high risk of relapse. Relapse during this period may affect fetal and child development. The consequences of psychotropic medication during pregnancy are also a major concern.

A simple and versatile microfluidic device for efficient biomacromolecule crystallization and structural analysis by serial crystallography.

Determining optimal conditions for the production of well diffracting crystals is a key step in every biocrystallography project. Here, a microfluidic device is described that enables the production of crystals by counter-diffusion and their direct on-chip analysis by serial crystallography at room temperature. Nine 'non-model' and diverse biomacromolecules, including seven soluble proteins, a membrane protein and an RNA duplex, were crystallized and treated on-chip with a variety of standard techniques including micro-seeding, crystal soaking with ligands and crystal detection by fluorescence.

Music training with Démos program positively influences cognitive functions in children from low socio-economic backgrounds.

This study aimed at evaluating the impact of a classic music training program (Démos) on several aspects of the cognitive development of children from low socio-economic backgrounds. We were specifically interested in general intelligence, phonological awareness and reading abilities, and in other cognitive abilities that may be improved by music training such as auditory and visual attention, working and short-term memory and visuomotor precision. We used a longitudinal approach with children presented with standardized tests before the start and after 18 months of music training.

Multiscale poromechanics of wet cement paste.

Capillary effects, such as imbibition drying cycles, impact the mechanics of granular systems over time. A multiscale poromechanics framework was applied to cement paste, which is the most common building material, experiencing broad humidity variations over the lifetime of infrastructure. First, the liquid density distribution at intermediate to high relative humidity is obtained using a lattice gas density functional method together with a realistic nanogranular model of cement hydrates.

Letter migration errors reflect spatial pooling of orthographic information.

Prior research has shown that readers may misread words by switching letters across words (e.g., the word sand in sand lane being recognized as land).

Activity of a Synthetic Peptide Targeting MgtC on Intramacrophage Survival and Biofilm Formation.

Antivirulence strategies aim to target pathogenicity factors while bypassing the pressure on the bacterium to develop resistance. The MgtC membrane protein has been proposed as an attractive target that is involved in the ability of several major bacterial pathogens, including , to survive inside macrophages. In liquid culture, MgtC acts negatively on biofilm formation.

The impact of spelling regularity on handwriting production: A coupled fMRI and kinematics study.

Current models of writing assume that the orthographic processes involved in spelling retrieval and the motor processes involved in the control of the hand are independent. This view has been challenged by behavioral studies, which showed that the linguistic features of words impact motor execution during handwriting. We designed an experiment coupling functional magnetic resonance imaging and kinematic recordings during a writing to dictation task.

Genomic study of a novel magnetotactic Alphaproteobacteria uncovers the multiple ancestry of magnetotaxis.

Ecological and evolutionary processes involved in magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) adaptation to their environment have been a matter of debate for many years. Ongoing efforts for their characterization are progressively contributing to understand these processes, including the genetic and molecular mechanisms responsible for biomineralization. Despite numerous culture-independent MTB characterizations, essentially within the Proteobacteria phylum, only few species have been isolated in culture because of their complex growth conditions.

A gated relaxation oscillator mediated by FrzX controls morphogenetic movements in Myxococcus xanthus.

Dynamic control of cell polarity is of critical importance for many aspects of cellular development and motility. In Myxococcus xanthus, MglA, a G protein, and MglB, its cognate GTPase-activating protein, establish a polarity axis that defines the direction of movement of the cell and that can be rapidly inverted by the Frz chemosensory system. Although vital for collective cell behaviours, how Frz triggers this switch has remained unknown.

Identification of Chemical Inducers of the Phosphate-Starvation Signaling Pathway in A. thaliana Using Chemical Genetics.

In spite of its importance for agriculture and 30 years of genetic studies, the phosphate-starvation signaling pathway, that allows plants to detect, respond, and adapt to changes in the phosphate concentration of the rhizosphere, remains poorly known. Chemical genetics has been increasingly and successfully used as a complementary approach to genetics for the dissection of signaling pathways in diverse organisms. Screens can be designed to identify chemicals interfering specifically with a pathway of interest.

Cross-classification of musical and vocal emotions in the auditory cortex.

Whether emotions carried by voice and music are processed by the brain using similar mechanisms has long been investigated. Yet neuroimaging studies do not provide a clear picture, mainly due to lack of control over stimuli. Here, we report a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study using comparable stimulus material in the voice and music domains-the Montreal Affective Voices and the Musical Emotional Bursts-which include nonverbal short bursts of happiness, fear, sadness, and neutral expressions.

LFP beta amplitude is linked to mesoscopic spatio-temporal phase patterns.

Beta oscillations observed in motor cortical local field potentials (LFPs) recorded on separate electrodes of a multi-electrode array have been shown to exhibit non-zero phase shifts that organize into planar waves. Here, we generalize this concept to additional classes of salient patterns that fully describe the spatial organization of beta oscillations. During a delayed reach-to-grasp task we distinguish planar, synchronized, random, circular, and radial phase patterns in monkey primary motor and dorsal premotor cortices.

MotAB-like machinery drives the movement of MreB filaments during bacterial gliding motility.

MreB is a bacterial actin that is important for cell shape and cell wall biosynthesis in many bacterial species. MreB also plays crucial roles in gliding motility, but the underlying mechanism remains unknown. Here we tracked the dynamics of single MreB particles in using single-particle tracking photoactivated localization microscopy.

From sublexical facilitation to lexical competition: ERP effects of masked neighbor priming.

Interactive-activation models posit that visual word recognition involves co-activation of orthographic neighbors (e.g., note, node) and competition among them via lateral inhibitory connections.

Methane: Fuel or Exhaust at the Emergence of Life?

As many of the methanogens first encountered at hydrothermal vents were thermophilic to hyperthermophilic and comprised one of the lower roots of the evolutionary tree, it has been assumed that methanogenesis was one of the earliest, if not the earliest, pathway to life. It being well known that hydrothermal springs associated with serpentinization also bore abiotic methane, it had been further assumed that emergent biochemistry merely adopted and quickened this supposed serpentinization reaction. Yet, recent hydrothermal experiments simulating serpentinization have failed to generate methane so far, thus casting doubt on this assumption.

Reachability and the sense of embodiment in amputees using prostheses.

Amputated patients are hardly satisfied with upper limb prostheses, and tend to favour the use of their contralateral arm to partially compensate their disability. This may seem surprising in light of recent evidences that external objects (rubber hand or tool) can easily be embodied, namely incorporated in the body representation. We investigated both implicit body representations (by evaluating the peripersonal space using a reachability judgement task) and the quality of bodily integration of the patient's prosthesis (assessed via questionnaires).

Endoscopic surgery for sinonasal tumors: The transcribriform approach.

Over the past 10 to 20 years, endoscopic endonasal surgery has become for many teams the preferred treatment for sinonasal tumors. Technical advances in the field of surgical instrumentation (good visualization, hemostasis…) and the progress of imaging guidance (to avoid neurovascular complication) has made those procedures simpler and safer. Nevertheless, endonasal endoscopic procedures require a trained surgical team of ENT specialist and neurosurgeon.

Poecillastrosides, Steroidal Saponins from the Mediterranean Deep-Sea Sponge Poecillastra compressa (Bowerbank, 1866).

The first chemical investigation of the Mediterranean deep-sea sponge (Bowerbank, 1866) led to the identification of seven new steroidal saponins named poecillastrosides A-G (-). All saponins feature an oxidized methyl at C-18 into a primary alcohol or a carboxylic acid. While poecillastrosides A-D (-) all contain an double bond at C-24 of the side-chain and two osidic residues connected at O-2', poecillastrosides E-G (-) are characterized by a cyclopropane on the side-chain and a connection at O-3' between both sugar units.

New insights into the function of a versatile class of membrane molecular motors from studies of surface (gliding) motility.

Cell motility is a central function of living cells, as it empowers colonization of new environmental niches, cooperation, and development of multicellular organisms. This process is achieved by complex yet precise energy-consuming machineries in both eukaryotes and bacteria. Bacteria move on surfaces using extracellular appendages such as flagella and pili but also by a less-understood process called gliding motility.

Is the Hebb repetition task a reliable measure of individual differences in sequence learning?

The Hebb repetition task, an operationalization of long-term sequence learning through repetition, is the focus of renewed interest, as it is taken to provide a laboratory analogue for naturalistic vocabulary acquisition. Indeed, recent studies have consistently related performance in the Hebb repetition task with a range of linguistic (dis)abilities. However, despite the growing interest in the Hebb repetition effect as a theoretical construct, no previous research has ever tested whether the task used to assess Hebb learning offers a stable and reliable measure of individual performance in sequence learning.

Hierarchical organization in the temporal structure of infant-direct speech and song.

Caregivers alter the temporal structure of their utterances when talking and singing to infants compared with adult communication. The present study tested whether temporal variability in infant-directed registers serves to emphasize the hierarchical temporal structure of speech. Fifteen German-speaking mothers sang a play song and told a story to their 6-months-old infants, or to an adult.

The mechanism of force transmission at bacterial focal adhesion complexes.

Various rod-shaped bacteria mysteriously glide on surfaces in the absence of appendages such as flagella or pili. In the deltaproteobacterium Myxococcus xanthus, a putative gliding motility machinery (the Agl-Glt complex) localizes to so-called focal adhesion sites (FASs) that form stationary contact points with the underlying surface. Here we show that the Agl-Glt machinery contains an inner-membrane motor complex that moves intracellularly along a right-handed helical path; when the machinery becomes stationary at FASs, the motor complex powers a left-handed rotation of the cell around its long axis.

TBCE Mutations Cause Early-Onset Progressive Encephalopathy with Distal Spinal Muscular Atrophy.

Tubulinopathies constitute a family of neurodevelopmental/neurodegenerative disorders caused by mutations in several genes encoding tubulin isoforms. Loss-of-function mutations in TBCE, encoding one of the five tubulin-specific chaperones involved in tubulin folding and polymerization, cause two rare neurodevelopmental syndromes, hypoparathyroidism-retardation-dysmorphism and Kenny-Caffey syndrome. Although a missense mutation in Tbce has been associated with progressive distal motor neuronopathy in the pmn/pmn mice, no similar degenerative phenotype has been recognized in humans.