Epilepsy is the most common neurological disorder in children, with an incidence of 100 per 100,000 children per year. Recurrent seizures during this period in life are often distressing to the individual and the family, but arguably the most...
Thermodynamics, and the classic balance between entropy and enthalpy, provides a proverbial zoo of exotic phase behaviour that chemists can harness to create new materials out of simple liquids and polymers. The diversity of self-assembling...
Access control is a core component of any information-security strategy. Researchers have spent tremendous energy over the past forty years defining abstract access-control models and proving various properties about them. However, surprisingly...
It has been well established that physical exercise has broad impacts across the lifespan, including improved cognition, brain function, and mental health. Studies investigating the mechanism underlying the cognitive enhancing effect of exercise...
Visual searches for a conjunction of features (e.g., a particular combination of color and shape) are ordinarily slow and difficult. However, search efficiency for a particular conjunction can improve dramatically within a few hundred practice...
Magneto-spectroscopy is used to characterize the confinement properties of strain-induced quantum wires and dots. The wires and dots are low energy regions in an ordinary GaAs/AlGaAs quantum well that are formed when microscopic...
The objective of this thesis was to examine the neural and physiological substrates underlying the processing of aversive information, and how individual differences in anxiety influence these responses. In a series of experiments, we utilized skin...
Ice mechanics. Compressibility. Fracture mechanics. Strains and stresses. Brittleness.
This work describes the effect of triaxial compressive confinement on the strength of columnar S2 ice loaded under conditions leading to brittle failure. Cubes of columnar S2 ice were tested at -10 °C under triaxial (proportional) loading where...
Face perception -- Physiological aspects. Face perception -- Social aspects. Sex differences (Psychology). Neuropsychology.
The general objective of the current thesis was to investigate the neural substrates underlying the perception of opposite-sex faces. Building on what is already known about the distributed network of brain areas supporting various dimensions of...
Public key infrastructure (Computer security). ; Computer networks -- Security measures. ; Operating systems (Computers). ; Microcomputers.
In 1976, Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman demonstrated how public key cryptography could enable secure information exchange between parties that do not share secrets. In order for public key cryptography to work in modern distributed...
Anabolic-androgenic steroids (AAS) are synthetic derivatives of the gonadal hormone, testosterone. Despite their many untoward side effects, AAS are wildly abused for their ergogenic properties. AAS have numerous effects on many organ systems,...
As humans we create goals and strive toward ideals, engaging in a constant endeavor to better ourselves or maintain our success. Whether goals are distant hopes for the future, or small steps of change, success requires some control over...
Every moment of our waking lives, our brains filter large quantities of sensory data for goal relevant information. This ability to modulate our sensitivity to incoming inputs is critical in the face of an otherwise overwhelming world, and...
Rats -- Behavior. Sexual behavior in animals. Vagina -- Psychophysiology. Cervix uteri -- Psychophysiology.
The present dissertation examined the contributions of vaginal and cervical stimulation to sexual motivation and reward in female rats. New, more complex behavioral methods such as the display of paced mating behavior and the induction of a...
The discovery of the Van Allen radiation belts in the 1958 was the first major discovery of the Space Age. There are two belts of energetic particles. The inner belt is very stable, but the outer belt is extremely variable, especially during...
The advent of hypervisors revolutionized the computing industry in terms of malware prevention and detection, secure virtual machine managers, and cloud resilience. However, this has resulted in a disjointed response to handling known threats...
While plant-plant interactions define community patterns in alpine tundra around the world, topography and elevation and the resulting physical changes that occur when moving down-slope play a greater role in community formation and maintenance in...
Electroencephalography -- Data processing. ; Epilepsy -- Diagnosis. ; Signal processing -- Mathematics. ; Time-series analysis. ; Wavelets (Mathematics).
Visual interpretation of the EEG associated with an epileptic seizure (ictal EEG) can be cumbersome and sometimes misleading, due to rapid seizure spread, limited spatial resolution and the fact that signals of interest are often obscured by...
The oculomotor system needs up-to-date information about eye position in order to make accurate saccades to stimuli in the environment. This thesis investigated how well the oculomotor system uses information about eye position to make a variety of...
Corpus callosum -- Physiology. Cerebral hemispheres. Laterality. Sensorimotor integration. Brain -- Localization of functions.
The overarching goal of the dissertation was to further understanding of the relationship between callosal organization, functional lateralization, and interhemispheric communication in the healthy, young adult brain. Three converging methodologies...
This research has established feasibility of surface temperature characterization using ruby fluorescence. Study was performed in pin-on-disk geometry, with balls made of different plastics sliding against the sapphire disk. Fluorescence signal was...
Cellulase -- Biotechnology. ; Hydrolysis. ; Paper industry -- Technological innovations. ; Biomass energy -- Economic aspects. ; Saccharomyces cerevisiae -- Genetics. ; Enzymes -- Industrial applications.
Paper sludge is the largest solid waste stream produced by pulp and paper industry, and is also an attractive feedstock for emergent technologies based on processing of cellulosic biomass featuring enzymatic hydrolysis. This study focuses on...
Hand -- Psychophysiology. Conditioned response. Hand -- Movements. Perceptual-motor processes.
The present studies examine the flexible application of two stimulus-response (SR) mappings to a single set of stimuli. The following questions are addressed: (1) Can dual mapping performance equal single mapping performance (2) Can rapid map...
Form perception. ; Visual perception. ; Motion perception (Vision). ; Color vision. ; Visual cortex -- Psychophysiology.
Visual filling-in occurs when a retinally stabilized object undergoes perceptual fading. It is commonly believed that information about the apparently vanished object is lost and replaced solely by information arising from the surrounding...
Our daily lives are pervaded by sounds, predominantly speech, music, and environmental sounds. We readily recognize and categorize such sounds. Our understanding of how the brain so effortlessly recognizes and categorizes sounds is still...
Smartphones we carry everyday represent the first truly context-aware mobile device. By embedding specialized sensors and pushing AI into phones, it is now possible to continuously sense and infer people's physical activities, social interactions,...
Microwave imaging (MI) is based on recovering dielectric properties (permittivity and conductivity) of materials. Over the last two decades, MI has attracted increasing interests in biomedical applications, in particular, for breast cancer...