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The ability to predict and understand other people’s actions is critical for real-world social behavior. Here we hypothesized that representations of social roles (e.g., cashier, mechanic, doctor) enable people to build rapid expectations about what others know and how they might act. Using a self-paced read- ing paradigm, we show that role representations support real time expectations about how other people might act (Study 1) and the knowledge they might possess (Study 2). Moreover, people reported more surprisal when the events deviated from role expectations, and they were more likely to misremember what happened. Our results suggest that roles are a powerful route for social understanding that has been previously under- studied in social cognition. 

While numerous studies have been conducted, developing a compliant robotic gripper capable of replicating human hand grasping and manipulation capabilities is still challenging. This paper presents the design, fabrication, and preliminary testing of an anthropomorphic soft robotic gripper driven by twisted string actuators (TSAs). Termed as STAR–2, it is a second generation TSA-driven soft gripper from the Smart Robotics Laboratory at the University of Nevada, Reno. The novel design facilitated a monolithic structure comprising of a 3-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) thumb and four fingers each with 2-DOFs. On account of using tendon-based actuation and the large footprint required for the thumb, the design employed meticulously planned tendon routing within the monolithic structure. Preliminary results showed STAR–2’s enhanced ability to demonstrate grasp taxonomies and dexterity over STAR–1. 

Abstract Physical activity has been consistently linked to decreased incidence of breast cancer and a substantial increase in the length of survival of patients with breast cancer. However, the understanding of how applied physical forces directly regulate breast cancer remains limited. We investigated the role of mechanical forces in altering the chemoresistance, proliferation and metastasis of breast cancer cells. We found that applied mechanical tension can dramatically alter gene expression in breast cancer cells, leading to decreased proliferation, increased resistance to chemotherapeutic treatment and enhanced adhesion to inflamed endothelial cells and collagen I under fluidic shear stress. A mechanistic analysis of the pathways involved in these effects supported a complex signaling network that included Abl1, Lck, Jak2 and PI3K to regulate pro-survival signaling and enhancement of adhesion under flow. Studies using mouse xenograft models demonstrated reduced proliferation of breast cancer cells with orthotopic implantation and increased metastasis to the skull when the cancer cells were treated with mechanical load. Using high throughput mechanobiological screens we identified pathways that could be targeted to reduce the effects of load on metastasis and found that the effects of mechanical load on bone colonization could be reduced through treatment with a PI3Kγ inhibitor.