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Immersive technologies, such as virtual and augmented reality, initially failed to live up to expectations, but have improved greatly, with many new head-worn displays and associated applications being released over the past few years. Unfortunately, 'cybersickness' remains as a common user problem that must be overcome if mass adoption is to be realized. This article evaluates the state of research on this problem, identifies challenges that must be addressed, and formulates an updated cybersickness research and development (R&D) agenda. The new agenda recommends prioritizing creation of powerful, lightweight, and untethered head-worn displays, reduction of visual latencies, standardization of symptom and aftereffect measurement, development of improved countermeasures, and improved understanding of the magnitude of the problem and its implications for job performance. Some of these priorities are unresolved problems from the original agenda which should get increased attention now that immersive technologies are proliferating widely. If the resulting R&D agenda is carefully executed, it should render cybersickness a challenge of the past and accelerate mass adoption of immersive technologies to enhance training, performance, and recreation.

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Brain-computer interfacing is a technology that has the potential to improve patient engagement in robot-assisted rehabilitation therapy. For example, movement intention reduces mu (8-13 Hz) oscillation amplitude over the sensorimotor cortex, a phenomenon referred to as event-related desynchronization (ERD). In an ERD-contingent assistance paradigm, initial BCI-enhanced robotic therapy studies have used ERD to provide robotic assistance for movement. Here we investigated how ERD changed as a function of audio-visual stimuli, overt movement from the participant, and robotic assistance. Twelve unimpaired subjects played a computer game designed for rehabilitation therapy with their fingers using the FINGER robotic exoskeleton. In the game, the participant and robot matched movement timing to audio-visual stimuli in the form of notes approaching a target on the screen set to the consistent beat of popular music. The audio-visual stimulation of the game alone did not cause ERD, before or after training. In contrast, overt movement by the subject caused ERD, whether or not the robot assisted the finger movement. Notably, ERD was also present when the subjects remained passive and the robot moved their fingers to play the game. This ERD occurred in anticipation of the passive finger movement with similar onset timing as for the overt movement conditions. These results demonstrate that ERD can be contingent on expectation of robotic assistance; that is, the brain generates an anticipatory ERD in expectation of a robot-imposed but predictable movement. This is a caveat that should be considered in designing BCIs for enhancing patient effort in roboticallyassisted therapy.

The issue of heterozygosity continues to be a challenge in the analysis of genome sequences. In this article, we describe the use of allele ratios to distinguish biologically significant single-nucleotide variants from background noise. An application of this approach is the identification of lethal mutations in Caenorhabditis elegans essential genes, which must be maintained by the presence of a wild-type allele on a balancer. The h448 allele of let-504 is rescued by the duplication balancer sDp2. We readily identified the extent of the duplication when the percentage of read support for the lesion was between 70 and 80%. Examination of the EMS-induced changes throughout the genome revealed that these mutations exist in contiguous blocks. During early embryonic division in self-fertilizing C. elegans, alkylated guanines pair with thymines. As a result, EMS-induced changes become fixed as either G→A or C→T changes along the length of the chromosome. Thus, examination of the distribution of EMS-induced changes revealed the mutational and recombinational history of the chromosome, even generations later. We identified the mutational change responsible for the h448 mutation and sequenced PCR products for an additional four alleles, correlating let-504 with the DNA-coding region for an ortholog of a NFκB-activating protein, NKAP. Our results confirm that whole-genome sequencing is an efficient and inexpensive way of identifying nucleotide alterations responsible for lethal phenotypes and can be applied on a large scale to identify the molecular basis of essential genes.