Motor Cortical Plasticity Induced by Volitional Muscle Activity-Triggered Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and Median Nerve Stimulation

Bilateral motor training is a useful method for modifying corticospinal excitability. The effects of bilateral movement that are caused by artificial stimulation on corticospinal excitability have not been reported. We compared motor-evoked potentials (MEPs) of the primary motor cortex (M1) after conventional bilateral motor training and artificial bilateral movements generated by electromyogram activity of abductor pollicis brevis (APB) muscle-triggered peripheral nerve stimulation (c-MNS) and transcranial magnetic stimulation of the ipsilateral M1 (i-TMS). A total of three protocols with different interventions—bilateral finger training, APB-triggered c-MNS, and APB-triggered i-TMS—were administered to 12 healthy participants. Each protocol consisted of 360 trials of 30 min for each trial. MEPs that were induced by single-pulse TMS, short-interval intracortical inhibition (SICI), and intracortical facilitation (ICF) that were induced by paired-pulse TMS were assessed as outcome measures at baseline and at 0, 20, 40, and 60 min after intervention. MEP amplitude significantly increased up to 40 min post-intervention in all protocols compared to that at the baseline, although there were some differences in the changing pattern of ICF and SICI in each protocol. These findings suggest that artificial bilateral movement has the potential to increase the ipsilateral cortical excitability of the moving finger.

Bilateral Throw Execution in Young Judokas for a Maximum All Year Round Result

Purpose: This study investigates bilateral performance with the Special Judo Fitness Test (SJFT) and its associations with competition performance (CP) and competition volume (CV) in judo. Methods: The SJFT compared movement patterns of the dominant (D) and nondominant (ND) sides on a sample of 27 youth judoka. Repeated-measures analysis of variance was used to determine differences in SJFT execution to the D and ND side, and for associations, the Pearson correlation was used (P < .05). Results: The total number of throws is significantly higher on the D side, with better performance in the final SJFT index. The CP showed positive correlations with the D side of SJFT executions in the second part of SJFT (P = .042) and the total number of throws (P = .036). On the ND side, the CP showed a positive correlation with the second part of the SJFT (P = .014), a negative correlation with the third part of the SJFT (P = .035), and a positive correlation in the total number of throws (P = .027). CV shows significant correlations with all parameters of the SJFT in the D and ND sides, with stronger correlations on the ND side. Conclusions: The study presents significantly better performance in judokas’ D side in SJFT. Associations between CP and CV with the SJFT were significant in connection to both body sides. It highlights the importance of bilateral movement development and good execution of the throwing techniques for the D and ND body sides of youth judoka to achieve greater CP all year round.

The Use of the Bilateral Levitation of Transport Pods Relatively to the Arch Trestle

Background: The arch trestle allows using two working surfaces: internal (under the arch) and external (over the arch) which may be used for moving of the transport pods. Transport pods include magnetic field sources, and the trestle is equipped with a stator winding. The stator winding is subdivided into the accelerating winding and suspension and levitation winding. As an option, the winding providing levitation can be replaced with permanent magnets. Aim: to show capacities of the arch trestle for transportation of passengers and goods. Methods: patent search, modeling. Results: simultaneous transportation of goods and passengers is possible both in the same and opposite directions. Conclusion: the efficiency of the transport system increases due to bilateral movement of modules.

Upper Arm Exoskeleton Using Robotic Arm for Physiotherapy

Stroke is a major cause of disability in worldwide and also one of the causes of death after coronary heart disease. Many devices had been designed for hand motor function rehabilitation that a stroke survivor can use for bilateral movement practice. This paper deals with the rehabilitation of upper arm by an Arm exoskeleton. This can be used for physical therapy and to assist the user with routine activities. Ultimately, the user should feel as if they are in control of their arm without too much effort while providing smooth movements depending on the direction that is desired.

‘The Crown Wears Many Hats’: Canadian Aboriginal Law and the Black-boxing of Empire

In this ambitious but earthbound critique of the ‘black-boxing of empire’, Mariana Valverde and Adriel Weaver adroitly trace the construction and deconstruction of the spectral corpus mysticum in Canadian legal discourse. The authors interrogate the weird legal agency of the Crown in aboriginal rights cases, disclosing the relentless production of novelty concealed beneath the conservative image of a continuous, eternal office and recalling the Latourian lesson about law’s soi disant homeostatic character: ‘even in this case [in which legal principles are modified], it will only be a matter of making the body of legal doctrine still more coherent, so that, in the last analysis, nothing will really have budged.’ These cases, Valverde and Weaver show, contract into themselves Canada’s colonial/postcolonial histories and the full weight of its legal tradition’s contradictory commitments. The sovereign gesture of recognition, offered by way of the ‘honour of the Crown’, paradoxically deprives the aboriginal nations so recognised of their very claim to existence, their nationhood: ‘the Canadian state now has obligations of sovereign/royal honour toward all aboriginal peoples … but the naming of those obligations simultaneously performs a kind of re-coronation of the very colonial sovereign whose servants caused so much harm to aboriginal peoples over the centuries’. Valverde and Weaver allow us to linger on this troubling sense of the uncanny, of the historical deja vu or phantasm of repetition that takes on materiality in the bilateral movement of the Crown through the networks of public law. It is a phantasm that reappears in the discursive techniques of judges that are, in fact, elaborating and reinventing precisely the discretionary doctrinal construct (‘honour of the Crown’) that they claim, instead, to merely appeal to, hearkening to an eternal spring of sovereign virtue through the mists of antiquity.