scholarly journals Correlations Between Body Angles and Substrate Curvature in the Parasitoid Wasp Trichogramma Minutum: A Possible Mechanism of Host Radius Measurement

1986 ◽  
Vol 125 (1) ◽  
pp. 271-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Schmidt ◽  
J. J.B. Smith

The parasitoid wasps of the genus Trichogramma use the surface curvature of their insect egg hosts to set an upper limit to the number of progeny allocated to the host, as well as the duration of their host examination. In addition, host recognition and host acceptance are in part mediated by surface curvature. In this paper, the relationships between the positions of body parts of the wasp and surface curvature are examined in order to determine a possible mechanism for curvature detection by the wasp. Wasps of different sizes were photographed in profile while examining glass bead models of different diameters. The positions of selected body parts were analysed using a digitizer and microcomputer. The height of the wasp above the model surface did not change with surface curvature. Furthermore, the angle of the head relative to the thorax was also constant over the range of models used. Only the scapal-head angle and flagellar-head angle changed significantly with surface curvature. A curvature detecting mechanism is proposed in which the wasp uses the scapal-head angle to measure the curvature of the surface. The body of the wasp is maintained at a preferred height and angle to the substrate, serving as a fixed platform from which curvature measurements are made. Additional features of this mechanism, as well as its correlation with morphological and behavioural findings, are discussed.

Author(s):  
Majeed Ahmed ◽  
Syed Anwar Ali Zaidi

The intent of study is to establish a criterion for the experimental setup of rasterstereography, one that is more efficient, simple, accurate and precise to examine and analyse the curvature of the object or the subject. Firstly, the setup is needed to be calibrated and for this purpose we considered a reference plane, eleven cylinders of different diameter ranging from 30-119mm were used for calibration of curvature maps of cylinders and cylindrical objects through the regression line. Further this model was tested on subjects and for that we reckoned cylindrical body parts of boys and a total of 30 college students were involved as subjects in this process. The body parts to be measured had curvature like cylinders of different diameters ranging from 42-120mm. The distortion of raster grid was observed, quantified and recorded with the help of different tools and results were established. The regression line was obtained between the measured (x) and computed (y). The standard error of the cylindrical object was 0..04 and that of cylindrical body parts of subjects was 0.0407. This technique was validated through the coefficient of correlation for objects and subjects which was found to be 0.99982 and 0.999141 respectively. Accuracy and Precision were also calculated for this model, which were 99.60% accurate and 99.49% precise. Curvature maps were found more than 99%. This technique is inexpensive, reliable, reproducible and may be installed easily in hospitals to examine appraise body shape, composition and deformities of young men.


1987 ◽  
Vol 232 (1268) ◽  
pp. 323-366 ◽  

This work continues a comprehensive description of the external sensory morphology of the parasitoid wasp Trichogramma minutum . All sensilla and associated structures identified by electron microscopy are described. In addition, this study also includes the hairplates associated with the antennae and neck region. The majority of sensilla appear to be mechanosensory, and are either trichoid or campaniform in structure. Large, socketed setae (10–50 μm long) are found on all leg segments, but vary considerably in body size and shape, depending upon location. On the tibial and tarsal segments of the pro- and metathoracic legs some of the larger hairs have been modified to form antennal and wing combs. On both the meso- and metathoracic legs a distal tibial seta is greatly enlarged and functions as a socketed spur. The sensilla that compose the hairplates are relatively short (1–3 μm) and differ in socket morphology from the longer setae located elsewhere on the body surface. Hairplates occur on the dorsal surface of the trochanter at the coxatrochanteral joint, on the distal portion of the coxae, around the neck on the dorsal and ventral surfaces of the episternum, and the opening of the postocciput. The most complex arrangement of hairplates surrounds the distal portion of the scape, and comprises four separate groups of hairs. Hairplates are also located on the dorsal and lateral surfaces of the proximal end of the pedicellus. Nine to eleven campaniform sensilla are located on the trochanter of each leg. The proximal subdivision of the femur is equipped with six sensilla grouped together on the ventral surface. Three to five campaniform sensilla are clustered on the dorsal surface of the distal end of the tibia of each leg, and a single pair of sensilla is located at the distal end of the first tarsomere. All the leg campaniform sensilla are elliptical, and 1.5–2.5 μm long. The number, position and morphology of the sensilla was consistent between individuals. The structure and function of these sensory structures are discussed in relation to their role in walking, proprioceptive control of posture, and gravity detection. The scaling of sensilla to body size and homologies with larger insects are also examined, and the possible role of these structures in the detection and measurement of host curvature is considered.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  

Melanoma is the most dangerous type of skin cancer in which mostly damaged unpaired DNA starts mutating abnormally and staged an unprecedented proliferation of epithelial skin to form a malignant tumor. In epidemics of skin, pigment-forming melanocytes of basal cells start depleting and form uneven black or brown moles. Melanoma can further spread all over the body parts and could become hard to detect. In USA Melanoma kills an estimated 10,130 people annually. This challenge can be succumbed by using the certain anti-cancer drug. In this study design, cyclophosphamide were used as a model drug. But it has own limitation like mild to moderate use may cause severe cytopenia, hemorrhagic cystitis, neutropenia, alopecia and GI disturbance. This is a promising challenge, which is caused due to the increasing in plasma drug concentration above therapeutic level and due to no rate limiting steps involved in formulation design. In this study, we tried to modify drug release up to threefold and extended the release of drug by preparing and designing niosome based topical gel. In the presence of Dichloromethane, Span60 and cholesterol, the initial niosomes were prepared using vacuum evaporator. The optimum percentage drug entrapment efficacy, zeta potential, particle size was found to be 72.16%, 6.19mV, 1.67µm.Prepared niosomes were further characterized using TEM analyzer. The optimum batch of niosomes was selected and incorporated into topical gel preparation. Cold inversion method and Poloxamer -188 and HPMC as core polymers, were used to prepare cyclophosphamide niosome based topical gel. The formula was designed using Design expert 7.0.0 software and Box-Behnken Design model was selected. Almost all the evaluation parameters were studied and reported. The MTT shows good % cell growth inhibition by prepared niosome based gel against of A375 cell line. The drug release was extended up to 20th hours. Further as per ICH Q1A (R2), guideline 6 month stability studies were performed. The results were satisfactory and indicating a good formulation approach design was achieved for Melanoma treatment.


Somatechnics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalindi Vora

This paper provides an analysis of how cultural notions of the body and kinship conveyed through Western medical technologies and practices in Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) bring together India's colonial history and its economic development through outsourcing, globalisation and instrumentalised notions of the reproductive body in transnational commercial surrogacy. Essential to this industry is the concept of the disembodied uterus that has arisen in scientific and medical practice, which allows for the logic of the ‘gestational carrier’ as a functional role in ART practices, and therefore in transnational medical fertility travel to India. Highlighting the instrumentalisation of the uterus as an alienable component of a body and subject – and therefore of women's bodies in surrogacy – helps elucidate some of the material and political stakes that accompany the growth of the fertility travel industry in India, where histories of privilege and difference converge. I conclude that the metaphors we use to structure our understanding of bodies and body parts impact how we imagine appropriate roles for people and their bodies in ways that are still deeply entangled with imperial histories of science, and these histories shape the contemporary disparities found in access to medical and legal protections among participants in transnational surrogacy arrangements.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (17) ◽  
pp. 2-1-2-6
Author(s):  
Shih-Wei Sun ◽  
Ting-Chen Mou ◽  
Pao-Chi Chang

To improve the workout efficiency and to provide the body movement suggestions to users in a “smart gym” environment, we propose to use a depth camera for capturing a user’s body parts and mount multiple inertial sensors on the body parts of a user to generate deadlift behavior models generated by a recurrent neural network structure. The contribution of this paper is trifold: 1) The multimodal sensing signals obtained from multiple devices are fused for generating the deadlift behavior classifiers, 2) the recurrent neural network structure can analyze the information from the synchronized skeletal and inertial sensing data, and 3) a Vaplab dataset is generated for evaluating the deadlift behaviors recognizing capability in the proposed method.


Author(s):  
Anne Phillips

No one wants to be treated like an object, regarded as an item of property, or put up for sale. Yet many people frame personal autonomy in terms of self-ownership, representing themselves as property owners with the right to do as they wish with their bodies. Others do not use the language of property, but are similarly insistent on the rights of free individuals to decide for themselves whether to engage in commercial transactions for sex, reproduction, or organ sales. Drawing on analyses of rape, surrogacy, and markets in human organs, this book challenges notions of freedom based on ownership of our bodies and argues against the normalization of markets in bodily services and parts. The book explores the risks associated with metaphors of property and the reasons why the commodification of the body remains problematic. The book asks what is wrong with thinking of oneself as the owner of one's body? What is wrong with making our bodies available for rent or sale? What, if anything, is the difference between markets in sex, reproduction, or human body parts, and the other markets we commonly applaud? The book contends that body markets occupy the outer edges of a continuum that is, in some way, a feature of all labor markets. But it also emphasizes that we all have bodies, and considers the implications of this otherwise banal fact for equality. Bodies remind us of shared vulnerability, alerting us to the common experience of living as embodied beings in the same world. Examining the complex issue of body exceptionalism, the book demonstrates that treating the body as property makes human equality harder to comprehend.


Author(s):  
Rajendra Pai N. ◽  
U. Govindaraju

Ayurveda in its principle has given importance to individualistic approach rather than generalize. Application of this examination can be clearly seem like even though two patients suffering from same disease, the treatment modality may change depending upon the results of Dashvidha Pariksha. Prakruti and Pramana both used in Dashvidha Pariksha. Both determine the health of the individual and Bala (strength) of Rogi (Patient). Ayurveda followed Swa-angula Pramana as the unit of measurement for measuring the different parts of the body which is prime step assessing patient before treatment. Sushruta and Charaka had stated different Angula Pramana of each Pratyanga (body parts). Specificity is the characteristic property of Swa-angula Pramana. This can be applicable in present era for example artificial limbs. A scientific research includes collection, compilation, analysis and lastly scrutiny of entire findings to arrive at a conclusion. Study of Pramana and its relation with Prakruti was conducted in 1000 volunteers using Prakruti Parkishan proforma with an objective of evaluation of Anguli Pramana in various Prakriti. It was observed co-relating Pramana in each Prakruti and Granthokta Pramana that there is no vast difference in measurement of head, upper limb and lower limb. The observational study shows closer relation of features with classical texts.


Author(s):  
Brandon Shaw

Romeo’s well-known excuse that he cannot dance because he has soles of lead is demonstrative of the autonomous volitional quality Shakespeare ascribes to body parts, his utilization of humoral somatic psychology, and the horizontally divided body according to early modern dance practice and theory. This chapter considers the autonomy of and disagreement between the body parts and the unruliness of the humors within Shakespeare’s dramas, particularly Romeo and Juliet. An understanding of the body as a house of conflicting parts can be applied to the feet of the dancing body in early modern times, as is evinced not only by literary texts, but dance manuals as well. The visuality dominating the dance floor provided opportunity for social advancement as well as ridicule, as contemporary sources document. Dance practice is compared with early modern swordplay in their shared approaches to the training and social significance of bodily proportion and rhythm.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3771
Author(s):  
Alexey Kashevnik ◽  
Walaa Othman ◽  
Igor Ryabchikov ◽  
Nikolay Shilov

Meditation practice is mental health training. It helps people to reduce stress and suppress negative thoughts. In this paper, we propose a camera-based meditation evaluation system, that helps meditators to improve their performance. We rely on two main criteria to measure the focus: the breathing characteristics (respiratory rate, breathing rhythmicity and stability), and the body movement. We introduce a contactless sensor to measure the respiratory rate based on a smartphone camera by detecting the chest keypoint at each frame, using an optical flow based algorithm to calculate the displacement between frames, filtering and de-noising the chest movement signal, and calculating the number of real peaks in this signal. We also present an approach to detecting the movement of different body parts (head, thorax, shoulders, elbows, wrists, stomach and knees). We have collected a non-annotated dataset for meditation practice videos consists of ninety videos and the annotated dataset consists of eight videos. The non-annotated dataset was categorized into beginner and professional meditators and was used for the development of the algorithm and for tuning the parameters. The annotated dataset was used for evaluation and showed that human activity during meditation practice could be correctly estimated by the presented approach and that the mean absolute error for the respiratory rate is around 1.75 BPM, which can be considered tolerable for the meditation application.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 696
Author(s):  
Eun Ji Choi ◽  
Jin Woo Moon ◽  
Ji-hoon Han ◽  
Yongseok Yoo

The type of occupant activities is a significantly important factor to determine indoor thermal comfort; thus, an accurate method to estimate occupant activity needs to be developed. The purpose of this study was to develop a deep neural network (DNN) model for estimating the joint location of diverse human activities, which will be used to provide a comfortable thermal environment. The DNN model was trained with images to estimate 14 joints of a person performing 10 common indoor activities. The DNN contained numerous shortcut connections for efficient training and had two stages of sequential and parallel layers for accurate joint localization. Estimation accuracy was quantified using the mean squared error (MSE) for the estimated joints and the percentage of correct parts (PCP) for the body parts. The results show that the joint MSEs for the head and neck were lowest, and the PCP was highest for the torso. The PCP for individual activities ranged from 0.71 to 0.92, while typing and standing in a relaxed manner were the activities with the highest PCP. Estimation accuracy was higher for relatively still activities and lower for activities involving wide-ranging arm or leg motion. This study thus highlights the potential for the accurate estimation of occupant indoor activities by proposing a novel DNN model. This approach holds significant promise for finding the actual type of occupant activities and for use in target indoor applications related to thermal comfort in buildings.


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