Alex Pretti's Minneapolis death was murder, Americans declare in damning poll as voters issue new demand to Trump... and reveal how few back the shooting'Greedy pig' Harry Styles is shamefully exploiting obsessed women. I know... because it happened to me: LIZ JONES My sister confided an unbearable secret about her boyfriend. Keeping quiet is intolerable... our mother will be devastated: DEAR JANE Trump accounts: Million-dollar baby plan aims to create a fortune for America's newest arrivals before age 30 Nicki Minaj flashes dagger-long nails as she clutches Trump's hand after gushing she's his No. 1 fan Bryan Kohberger's warped requests from behind bars leave prison guards sickened... as new pictures of Idaho murders reveal full extent of his barbarity Bruce Willis' wife Emma makes heartbreaking admission about star's dementia battle Hilarious live gaffe on David Muir's World News Tonight that'triggered behind the scenes meltdown' Haley Kalil confident her bitter lawsuit with ex-NFL star husband will be thrown out as she cites'free speech' after revealing size of his manhood'He was Mr Perfect... now we're seeing his true colours': How Harry Styles cultivated his'good boy' image... and why fans are now turning on him after this controversial new move Mom who gave all four of her daughters the same name slams critics: 'Our family doesn't need outside approval' Brooklyn Beckham and Nicola Peltz share photo of the'world's most expensive wine' at £17,000 a BOTTLE... as it's revealed she gets a '$1m monthly allowance' from her billionaire father Would YOU sit on it? Scientists develop a futuristic chair that puts you in an'altered state of mind' within minutes READ MORE: People are using'binaural beats' to simulate the effects of drugs Would you be brave enough to sit on a chair that can send you into an'altered state of mind' within minutes? That is the wild promise of the Aiora chair, a futuristic seat designed by scientists from the University of Essex and British furniture company DavidHugh LTD.

From bonobos and rats to tickling robots, research is finally cracking the secrets of why we're ticklish, and what that reveals about our brains In a grey-walled room in the Dutch city of Nijmegen, a strange activity is underfoot. Wearing a cap covered in sensors and positioning themselves into a chair, a person places their bare feet over two holes in a platform. Beneath this lies a robot, which uses a metal probe to begin to tickle their soles. Here, at Radboud University's Touch and Tickle lab, volunteers are being mercilessly tickled in the name of science. "We can manipulate how strong the stimulation is, how fast and where it is going to be applied on your foot," says Konstantina Kilteni, who runs the lab, of the robot tickling experiment.

VoxeLite can help you literally feel websites. VoxLite adds physical sensations of touch and feel to digital experiences like scrolling a smartphone. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A time traveler visiting from an earlier era might reasonably conclude that humanity has entered the age of cyborgs and cybernetics. Pedestrians regularly walk down city streets with tiny computers in their hands and even smaller digital devices shoved in their ear canals.

Tinglesbar incorporates ASMR into elementary school and doctor's visits simulations, offering a social haven for introverts. "It's time for your lice check," a woman who goes by "Ms. K" whispers directly into my ear as she starts running her fingers into my scalp and through each strand of hair. I'm in a dark room, Eastern flute music playing in the background as I sit across from my partner who's also having his hair caressed by a stranger. We close our eyes so we don't burst out laughing.

Pseudo - haptics exploit carefully crafted visual or auditory cues to trick the brain into "feeling" forces that are never physically applied, offering a low - cost alternative to traditional haptic hardware. Here, we present a comparative psychophysical study that quantifies how visual and auditory stimuli combine to evoke pseudo - haptic pressure sensations on a commodity tablet. Using a Unity - based Rollball game, participants (n = 4) guided a virtual ball across three textured terrains while their fi nger forces were captured in real time with a Robotous RFT40 force - torque sensor. Each terrain was paired with a distinct rolling - sound profile spanning 440 Hz - 4.7 kHz, 440 Hz - 13.1 kHz, or 440 Hz - 8.9 kHz; crevice collisions triggered additional "knoc king" bursts to heighten realism. Average tactile forces increased systematically with cue intensity: 0.40 N, 0.79 N and 0.88 N for visual - only trials and 0.41 N, 0.81 N and 0.90 N for audio - only trials on Terrains 1 - 3, respectively. Higher audio frequenci es and denser visual textures both elicited stronger muscle activation, and their combination further reduced the force needed to perceive surface changes, confirming multisensory integration. These results demonstrate that consumer - grade isometric devices can reliably induce, and measure graded pseudo - haptic feedback without specialized actuators, opening a path toward affordable rehabilitation tools, training simulators and assistive interfaces .

A central question in both cognitive science and artificial intelligence is how humans and artificial systems can acquire competencies for language and motor command in a co-developmental manner, despite having access to only limited learning experiences. This question is exemplified in human infants, who achieve remarkable generalization with sparse input. This is a stark contrast to large-scale models which rely on massive training corpora, to reach similar capabilities. This raises the issue of what mechanisms enable such efficient developmental learning. From the perspective of developmental psychology, infants acquire language through rich interaction with their embodied environments. T omasello's "verb-island" hypothesis argues that children initially learn verbs in specific, isolated contexts before generalizing across broader linguistic structures (1). He also emphasized the importance of embodiment in language acquisition, suggesting that grounding linguistic symbols in sensorimotor experiences is fundamental to language learning (2).

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. One of the major barriers they haven't overcome is the ability to "feel" sensations like a human. Although researchers have tried various sensors to give robots a rudimentary sense of touch, these systems are often costly, inaccurate, and limited to detecting only one type of sensation at a time. But that may be about to change. Researchers from the University of Cambridge and University College London have developed a new type of responsive "synthetic skin."

In Affective computing, recognizing users' emotions accurately is the basis of affective human-computer interaction. Understanding users' interoception contributes to a better understanding of individually different emotional abilities, which is essential for achieving inter-individually accurate emotion estimation. However, existing interoception measurement methods, such as the heart rate discrimination task, have several limitations, including their dependence on a well-controlled laboratory environment and precision apparatus, making monitoring users' interoception challenging. This study aims to determine other forms of data that can explain users' interoceptive or similar states in their real-world lives and propose a novel hypothetical concept "cyberoception," a new sense (1) which has properties similar to interoception in terms of the correlation with other emotion-related abilities, and (2) which can be measured only by the sensors embedded inside commodity smartphone devices in users' daily lives. Results from a 10-day-long in-lab/in-the-wild hybrid experiment reveal a specific cyberoception type "Turn On" (users' subjective sensory perception about the frequency of turning-on behavior on their smartphones), significantly related to participants' emotional valence. We anticipate that cyberoception to serve as a fundamental building block for developing more "emotion-aware", user-friendly applications and services.

In augmented reality (AR), where digital content is overlaid onto the real world, realistic thermal feedback has been shown to enhance immersion. Yet current thermal feedback devices, heavily influenced by the needs of virtual reality, often hinder physical interactions and are ineffective for immersion in AR. To bridge this gap, we have identified three design considerations relevant for AR thermal feedback: indirect feedback to maintain dexterity, thermal passthrough to preserve real-world temperature perception, and spatiotemporal rendering for dynamic sensations. We then created a unique and innovative thermal feedback device that satisfies these criteria. Human subject experiments assessing perceptual sensitivity, object temperature matching, spatial pattern recognition, and moving thermal stimuli demonstrated the impact of our design, enabling realistic temperature discrimination, virtual object perception, and enhanced immersion. These findings demonstrate that carefully designed thermal feedback systems can bridge the sensory gap between physical and virtual interactions, enhancing AR realism and usability.

In this paper I want to propose an argument to support Jerry Fodor's thesis (Fodor 1983) that input systems are modular and thus informationally encapsulated. The argument starts with the suggestion that there is a "grounding problem" in perception, i. e. that there is a problem in explaining how perception that can yield a visual experience is possible, how sensation can become meaningful perception of something for the subject. Given that visual experience is actually possible, this invites a transcendental argument that explains the conditions of its possibility. I propose that one of these conditions is the existence of a visual module in Fodor's sense that allows the step from sensation to object-identifying perception, thus enabling visual experience. It seems to follow that there is informationally encapsulated nonconceptual content in visual perception.