Dipyrromethanes (or dipyrrilmethanes) are important building blocks for many of the structures of interest in the areas of porphyrins, materials science, optics, and medicine. A variety of conditions have been established for the synthesis of dipyrromethanes of diverse structures, from substituted pyrroles to unsubstituted pyrrole and carbonyl…

Bacterial conjugation is a genetic transfer that involves cell-to-cell between donor and recipient cells. With the current method used to teach students in genetic courses at the undergraduate level, the transconjugants are identified using bacterial physiology and/or antibiotic resistance. Using physiology, however, is difficult for both…

Kinetics constitutes a core topic in both the lecture and laboratory components of lower- level chemistry courses. While textbook examples can ignore issues of time, temperature and safety, the laboratory can not. Reactions must occur slowly enough to be detected by students, occur rapidly enough for data collection in the few hours assigned to a…

This article presents the development of a carbon dioxide fountain. The advantages of the carbon dioxide fountain are that it is odorless and uses consumer chemicals. This experiment also is a nice visual experiment that allows students to see evidence of a gaseous reagent being consumed when a pressure sensor is available. (Contains 3 figures.)…

Over the last decade, remote instruments have become widely used in astronomy. Educational applications are more recent. This paper describes a program to bring radio astronomy into the undergraduate classroom through the use of a remote research-grade radio telescope, the MIT Haystack Observatory 37 m telescope. We examine the effectiveness of…

Interactive computerized modules have been linked to improved retention of material in clinical medicine. This study examined the effects of a new series of interactive learning modules for preclinical medical education, specifically in the areas of quiz performance, perceived difficulty of concepts, study time, and perceived stress level. We…

The synthesis of meso-octamethylporphyrinogen that involves a mini-scale preparation and uses acetone as reactant and also as solvent is presented. It results in a product of almost analytical grade directly from the reaction medium.

This paper examined the effects of personality traits on individuals' reactions to broken promises. We studied the effects of Neuroticism and Agreeableness on emotive and cognitive responses to breach and investigated whether these effects varied across different types (economic vs. social) and severity (high vs. low) of breach. We collected data…

If a moving stimulus (i.e., launcher) contacts a stationary target that subsequently begins to move, observers attribute motion of the target to the launcher (Michotte, 1946/1963). In experiments reported here, a stationary launcher adjacent to the target appeared or vanished and displacement in memory for the position of the target was measured.…

The stereoselective synthesis of an aryl vinyl bromide is accomplished in a rapid microscale reaction of "trans"-4-methoxycinnamic acid with N-bromosuccinimide in dichloromethane. The product is purified by dry column vacuum chromatography and its stereochemistry is determined by [superscript 1]H NMR. TLC, GC and GC-MSD can also be used. This…

Circular dichroism spectroscopy was used to measure the thermal unfolding of bovine pancreatic ribonuclease A (RNase A) with various concentrations of guanidine hydrochloride (GuHCl). A red shift in transition midpoint temperatures, T[subscript m], occurred with increasing concentration of the strong protein denaturant. van Hoff enthalpy changes,…

The transformation of 346 chemistry courses into a training experience that could provide undergraduate students with a skill set essential for a research-based chemistry career is presented. The course has an innovative structure that connects undergraduate students with graduate research labs at the semester midpoint and also includes new,…

This article presents how Stevens Institute of Technology (SIT) has adopted an Internet-based approach to implement its undergraduate student laboratories. The approach allowed student interaction with the experimental devices from remote locations at any time. Furthermore, it enabled instructors to include demonstrations of sophisticated…

According to the spatial registration hypothesis, the representation of stimulus location is automatically encoded during perception and it can interact with a more abstract linguistic representation. We tested this hypothesis in two experiments, using the semantic judgements of words. In the first experiment, words for animals that either fly or…

This study examined the influence of critical reading orientation on use of external strategies such as note-taking and underlining while reading an expository text. In two experiments, undergraduate students were asked either to review an article on a linguistic policy (critical reading) or to summarise it (less-critical reading). Experiment 1…