Newborns are able to neurally discriminate between speech and nonspeech right after birth. To date it remains unknown whether this early speech discrimination and the underlying neural language network is associated with later language development. Preterm-born children are an interesting cohort to investigate this relationship, as previous…

Objective: This study examined the liking of fruits and vegetables among college students and the relationship between skin carotenoid levels and liking of fruits and vegetables. Participants: Sixty-six undergraduate students enrolled at a university in the southeastern United States participated in this study beginning August 2019. Methods: Skin…

A theoretical distinction exists between the cool and hot aspects of executive function (EF). At the neural level, cool EF may be associated with activation in the lateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas the orbitofrontal cortex may play a key role in hot EF. However, some recent studies have shown that young children…

The pharmaceutical industry relies heavily on analytical techniques for identifying and characterizing drug compounds. In this experiment, undergraduate pharmacy students explored the applications of near-infrared spectroscopy for pharmaceutical analysis and its potential for identifying patterns and relationships among pharmaceutical samples. In…

With the advancements in broad-spectrum sunscreens and the recent bans on benzene-based sunscreens due to their environmental toxicity, there has been a push toward broad-spectrum sunscreens containing in organic active ingredients. In this study, a procedure was developed to analyze the particle size and size distribution of inorganic active…

Background: Depressive symptoms and stress are common in adults with intellectual disabilities. Our aim was to explore long-term biological stress levels, assessed by hair cortisol (HairF) and cortisone (HairE) concentrations, in adults with intellectual disabilities and depressive symptoms and to investigate the effects of bright light therapy…

Auditory speech discrimination is essential for normal language development. Children born preterm are at greater risk of language developmental delays. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy at term-equivalent age, the present study investigated early discrimination of speech prosody in 62 neonates born between week 23 and 41 of gestational…

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra are among the most common visualizations used by chemists in both academic and industrial settings, where they serve as both representations of submicroscopic entities and tools that support social discourse. The ability to use words to communicate about features within NMR spectra is thus an essential…

A new undergraduate inorganic chemistry laboratory experiment is presented. An introduction of the spectrochemical series and ligand exchange is explored using the coordination complex dirhodium tetraacetate, Rh[subscript 2](OAc)[subscript 4]. Students have measured the absorption spectra of the Rh[subscript 2] complex in the presence of various…

Atypical functional connectivity (FC) and an imbalance of excitation-to-inhibition (E/I) have been previously reported in cerebro-cerebellar circuits in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The current investigation used resting state fMRI and proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy ([superscript 1]H-MRS) to examine the relationships between E/I…

Small organic molecules offer a rich opportunity to discuss the interplay of chemical structure with properties such as the melting point and phenomena such as glass formation and can form the basis of fundamental considerations of structure-property relationships in macromolecules. Of particular importance are thermal transitions, specifically…

In selecting from a repertoire of traditional kinetics experiments, an instructor often has to choose among having students gain experience with the graphical method, the method of initial rates, or a temperature-dependent experiment in which students construct an Arrhenius plot. This paper presents an environmentally friendly bleaching reaction…

Low cost, open-source analytical instrumentation has the potential to increase educational outcomes for students and enable large-scale citizen science projects. Many of these instruments rely on smartphones to collect the data, mainly because they can effectively leverage a dramatic price-to-performance ratio of the optical sensors. However,…

The first 1,000 days of life are a critical window of vulnerability to exposure to socioeconomic and health challenges (i.e. poverty/undernutrition). The Brain Imaging for Global Health (BRIGHT) project has been established to deliver longitudinal measures of brain development from 0 to 24 months in UK and Gambian infants and to assess the impact…

The present study investigated the neural correlates of infant discrimination of very similar linguistic varieties (Quebecois and Parisian French) using functional Near InfraRed Spectroscopy. In line with previous behavioral and electrophysiological data, there was no evidence that 3-month-olds discriminated the two regional accents, whereas…