Heritability of Stroop and flanker performance in 12-year old children

Background  

There is great interest in appropriate phenotypes that serve as indicator of genetically transmitted frontal (dys)function, such as ADHD. Here we investigate the ability to deal with response conflict, and we ask to what extent performance variation on response interference tasks is caused by genetic variation. We tested a large sample of 12-year old monozygotic and dizygotic twins on two well-known and closely related response interference tasks; the color Stroop task and the Eriksen flanker task. Using structural equation modelling we assessed the heritability of several performance indices derived from those tasks.     

Homoclinic tangency and chaotic attractor disappearance in a dripping faucet experiment

A sequence of attractors, reconstructed from interdrops time series data of a leaky faucet experiment, is analyzed as a function of the mean dripping rate. We established the presence of a saddle point and its manifolds in the attractors and we explained the dynamical changes in the system using the evolution of the manifolds of the saddle point, as suggested by the orbits traced in first return maps. The sequence starts at a fixed point and evolves to an invariant torus of increasing diameter (a Hopf bifurcation) that pushes the unstable manifold towards the stable one. The torus breaks up and the system shows a chaotic attractor bounded by the unstable manifold of the saddle. With the attractor expansion the unstable manifold becomes tangential to the stable one, giving rise to the sudden disappearance of the chaotic attractor, which is an experimental observation of a so called chaotic blue sky catastrophe.     

The contribution of high frequencies to human brain activity underlying horizontal localization of natural spatial sounds

Background  

In the field of auditory neuroscience, much research has focused on the neural processes underlying human sound localization. A recent magnetoencephalography (MEG) study investigated localization-related brain activity by measuring the N1m event-related response originating in the auditory cortex. It was found that the dynamic range of the right-hemispheric N1m response, defined as the mean difference in response magnitude between contralateral and ipsilateral stimulation, reflects cortical activity related to the discrimination of horizontal sound direction. Interestingly, the results also suggested that the presence of realistic spectral information within horizontally located spatial sounds resulted in a larger right-hemispheric N1m dynamic range. Spectral cues being predominant at high frequencies, the present study further investigated the issue by removing frequencies from the spatial stimuli with low-pass filtering. This resulted in a stepwise elimination of direction-specific spectral information. Interaural time and level differences were kept constant. The original, unfiltered stimuli were broadband noise signals presented from five frontal horizontal directions and binaurally recorded for eight human subjects with miniature microphones placed in each subject's ear canals. Stimuli were presented to the subjects during MEG registration and in a behavioral listening experiment.     

Dark matter results from 100 live days of XENON100 data

We present results from the direct search for dark matter with the XENON100 detector, installed underground at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso of INFN, Italy. XENON100 is a two-phase time-projection chamber with a 62 kg liquid xenon target. Interaction vertex reconstruction in three dimensions with millimeter precision allows the selection of only the innermost 48 kg as the ultralow background fiducial target. In 100.9 live days of data, acquired between January and June 2010, no evidence for dark matter is found. Three candidate events were observed in the signal region with an expected background of (1.8 ± 0.6) events. This leads to the most stringent limit on dark matter interactions today, excluding spin-independent elastic weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) nucleon scattering cross sections above 7.0 × 10(-45) cm(2) for a WIMP mass of 50 GeV/c(2) at 90% confidence level.     

Fast atom bombardment positive-ion mass spectra of 1,2,2-tris(sulfonyl)hydrazines

Several 1,2,2-tris(sulfonyl)hydrazines, conceived as prodrugs of 1,2-bis(sulfonyl)hydrazines and synthesized as potential antineoplastic and trypanocidal drugs, were analyzed by mass Spectrometry as part of the confirmation of the structure of these compounds. Since these compounds showed activity against several transplanted animal tumors, an understanding of the mass spectral behavior of these agents is important to gain information should clinical trials and metabolic studies be undertaken. In all spectra, protonated molecular ions were observed. Collision activation resulted in considerable fragmentation in the fast atom bombardment spectra. Rearrangement ions formed by elimination of substituted diimides from the middle of the molecule were observed. Other rearrangements involving the alkyl substituent and sulfonyl oxygen also occurred.