In fish, caudally propagating waves of neural activity produce muscle bending moments. These moments, coupled with forces due to the body's elastic properties and forces due to fluid-body interactions, determine the deformation kinematics for swimming. Fully resolved simulations of neurally-activated swimming can be used to decode activation patterns underlying observed...
The rat whisker (vibrissal) system provides rats with an exquisitely acute tactile sense that has helped allow them to thrive all over the world. By actively rotating their whiskers back-and-forth ("whisking") against objects, rats can extract a rich variety of information including position, size, shape, orientation and texture. Today, however,...