Prolonged β-adrenergic stimulation causes ryanodine receptor clusters to disperse, drastically altering the frequency and kinetics of Ca²⁺ release events called ‘Ca²⁺ sparks’ in a process that is dependent on CaMKII and PKA.

A randomized placebo-controlled trial with behavioral, neuroimaging, and physiological measures reveals that oxytocin treatment facilitates pleasure and brain reward responses only to gentle stroking social touch by increasing peripheral blood concentrations.

Touch-mediated social interactions in human females elicited endogenous oxytocin and brain responses in a covariant manner, and these changes were modulated by the familiarity of the person delivering touch as well as the recent history of social interaction.

Affectionate touch in everyday life is linked to lower self-reported burden and is associated with higher endogenous oxytocin levels during times of prolonged stress.

Nonlinear elasticity of skin tissues and somatosensory neural responses are combined to predict and test C. elegans processing of touch stimuli and modifications due to changes in the body mechanics.

The cytosolic elements of the acid-sensing ion channel move toward the plasma membrane when the channel is exposed to acidic conditions.

Lesion analyses in right hemisphere stroke patients reveal the crucial role of the right anterior and posterior insula in the perception of affective touch.

Experimental and mathematical modeling approaches identify a novel mechanism of heart failure, linking disrupted calcium homeostasis and impaired contractility of cardiacmyocytes to nanoscale reorganization of calcium release channels.

A series of pre-registered psychophysical studies on self-touch tested two opposing models of somatosensory attenuation (cancelation) and enhancement (sharpening) regarding how action affects perception, and revealed that action prediction produces an attenuation, and not an enhancement, of the predicted touch.

Pleasant touch perception in humans is unaffected by spinothalamic disruption indicating integrated spinal processing of hedonic and discriminative tactile inputs rather than privileged C-tactile-lamina I-spinothalamic projections.