The relationship between counterfactual thinking and emotional reactions to event outcomes: Does one account fit all?

By enabling a comparison between what is and what might have been, counterfactual thoughts amplify our emotional responses to bad outcomes. Well-known demonstrations such as the action effect (the tendency to attribute most regret to a character whose actions brought about a bad outcome) and the temporal order effect (the tendency to undo the last in a series of events leading up to a bad outcome) are often explained in this way. An important difference between these effects is that outcomes are due to decisions in the action effect, whereas in the temporal order effect outcomes are achieved by chance. In Experiment 1, we showed that imposing time pressure leads to a significant reduction in the action but not in the temporal order effect. In Experiment 2, we found that asking participants to evaluate the protagonists (

Discovery of multiple neuropeptide families in the phylum Platyhelminthes

Available evidence shows that short amidated neuropeptides are widespread and have important functions within the nervous systems of all flatworms (phylum Platyhelminthes) examined, and could therefore represent a starting point for new lead drug compounds with which to combat parasitic helminth infections. However, only a handful of these peptides have been characterised, the rigorous exploration of the flatworm peptide signalling repertoire having been hindered by the dearth of flatworm genomic data. Through searches of both expressed sequence tags and genomic resources using the basic local alignment search tool (BLAST), we describe 96 neuropeptides on 60 precursors from 10 flatworm species. Most of these (51 predicted peptides on 14 precursors) are novel and are apparently restricted to flatworms; the remainder comprise nine recognised peptide families including FMRFamide-like (FLPs), neuropeptide F (NPF)-like, myomodulin-like, buccalin-like and neuropeptide FF (NPFF)-like peptides; notably, the latter have only previously been reported in vertebrates. Selected peptides were localised immunocytochemically to the Schistosoma mansoni nervous system. We also describe several novel flatworm NPFs with structural features characteristic of the vertebrate neuropeptide Y (NPY) superfamily, previously unreported characteristics which support the common ancestry of flatworm NPFs with the NPY-superfamily. Our dataset provides a springboard for investigation of the functional biology and therapeutic potential of neuropeptides in flatworms, simultaneously launching flatworm neurobiology into the post-genomic era. (C) 2009 Australian Society for Parasitology Inc. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Plasmonic nanorod metamaterials for biosensing.

Label-free plasmonic biosensors rely either on surface plasmon polaritons or on localized surface plasmons on continuous or nanostructured noble-metal surfaces to detect molecular-binding events(1-4). Despite undisputed advantages, including spectral tunability(3), strong enhancement of the local electric field(5,6) and much better adaptability to modern nanobiotechnology architectures(7), localized plasmons demonstrate orders of magnitude lower sensitivity compared with their guided counterparts(3). Here, we demonstrate an improvement in biosensing technology using a plasmonic metamaterial that is capable of supporting a guided mode in a porous nanorod layer. Benefiting from a substantial overlap between the probing field and the active biological substance incorporated between the nanorods and a strong plasmon-mediated energy confinement inside the layer, this metamaterial provides an enhanced sensitivity to refractive-index variations of the medium between the rods (more than 30,000nm per refractive-index unit). We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach using a standard streptavidin-biotin affinity model and record considerable improvement in the detection limit of small analytes compared with conventional label-free plasmonic devices.

Optical Nonlocalities and Additional Waves in Epsilon-Near-Zero Metamaterials

We analyze the optical properties of plasmonic nanorod metamaterials in the epsilon-near-zero regime and show, both theoretically and experimentally, that the performance of these composites is strongly affected by nonlocal response of the effective permittivity tensor. We provide the evidence of interference between main and additional waves propagating in the room-temperature nanorod metamaterials and develop an analytical description of this phenomenon. Additional waves are present in the majority of low-loss epsilon-near-zero structures and should be explicitly considered when designing applications of epsilon-near-zero composites, as they represent a separate communication channel.

Optical transmission properties and electric field distribution of interacting 2D silver nanorod Arrays

Silver nanorods have been grown by electrodeposition into thin film porous alumina templates (AAO). Optical transmission measurements using p-polarized incident white light shows clear plasmon resonance extinction peaks. We successfully model the dependence on angle in incidence of extinction peak height and position using a multiple-multipoles (MMP) approach with the different spectral features being clearly associated with the effective electric field distribution and coupling between individual nanorods.