In order to meet changing curricular needs, an electric motor and generator laboratory experience was designed, implemented, and assessed. The experiment is unusual in its early placement in the curriculum and in that it focuses on modeling electric motors, predicting their performance, and measuring efficiency of energy conversion. While…

Myopathy with deficiency of succinate dehydrogenase and aconitase is a recessively inherited disorder characterized by childhood-onset early fatigue, dyspnoea and palpitations on trivial exercise. The disease is non-progressive, but life-threatening episodes of widespread weakness, severe metabolic acidosis and rhabdomyolysis may occur. The…

We have introduced the study of synthesis pathways using two experiments: 1--the determination of the glycemic index (GI) of some foods and the effects of fiber and fat on the GI; 2--the determination of blood glucose levels after the ingestion of meals with high and low glycemic loads (GL). After a practice assembly, when the foods and meals that…

The typical experiment to measure the oxygen content in the atmosphere uses the rusting of steel wool inside a closed volume of air. Two key aspects of this experiment that make possible a successful measurement of the content of oxygen in the air are the use of a closed atmosphere and the use of a chemical reaction that involves the oxidation of…

Partial discharge (PD) monitoring is an effective predictive maintenance tool for electrical power equipment. As a result, an understanding of the theory related to PD and the associated measurement techniques is now necessary knowledge for power engineers in their professional life. This paper presents a modular course on PD phenomenon in which…

This laboratory project is one component of a semester-long advanced biochemistry laboratory course that uses several complementary techniques to study tRNA[superscript Phe] conformational changes induced by ligand binding. In this article we describe a set of experiments in which students assay metal-catalyzed hydrolysis of tRNA[superscript Phe]…

Laboratory experiments that focus on protein folding provide excellent opportunities for undergraduate students to learn important topics in the expanding interdisciplinary field of biophysics. Here, we describe the use of Stern-Volmer plots to determine the extent of solvent accessibility of the single tryptophan residue (trp-59) in unfolded and…

In this laboratory experiment, students obtain information about the structure of a host-guest complex from the interpretation of circular dichroism measurements. The value and sign of the induced circular dichroism (ICD) on an achiral chromophore guest when it complexes with a cyclodextrin can be related to the guest penetration and its…

In this laboratory experiment, high school students are challenged to prepare a six-layered chemical "rainbow" in a test tube. Students start with six unknown, colorless liquids and six pigments ranging from violet to red. The experiment is problem based and forces the students to apply their knowledge of solubility and density and combine it with…

This case study places the high school student as a researcher for Carbonation Creators (fictional entity), a company responsible for making the Fizzy Forcer (a device to improve carbonation in previously opened bottles of soft drinks). The company faces a class-action lawsuit claiming that the Fizzy Forcer does not retain carbonation levels in…

Wood is transparent for microwaves and due to its anisotropic structure has anisotropic dielectric properties. A laboratory experiment that allows for the qualitative demonstration and quantitative measurements of linear dichroism and birefringence in the microwave region is presented. As the proposed experiments are based on the anisotropy (of…

Data from the Oregon Youth Study, consisting of the verbal behavior of 210 adolescent boys determined to be at risk for delinquency (targets) and 210 of their friends (peers), were analyzed for their conformance to the complete family of matching theory equations in light of recent findings from the basic science, and using recently developed…

An experiment is conducted, which in four 3 h laboratory sessions, introduces third year undergraduate Biochemistry students to the technique of real-time PCR in a biological context. The model used is a murine erythroleukemia cell line (MEL cells). These continuously cycling, immature red blood cells, arrested at an early stage in erythropoiesis,…

When rats had to find new (jackpot) objects for rewards from among previously sampled baited objects, increasing the number of objects in the sample (study) segment of a trial from 3 to 5 and then to 7 (Experiment 1) or from 3 to 6 and 9 (Experiments 2 and 3) or from 6 to 9 and 12 (Experiment 4) did not reduce rats' test segment performance.…

Primary literature is our main mode of communication in the sciences. As such, it is important for our undergraduates in the discipline to learn how to read primary literature. Incorporating primary literature into undergraduate science courses is often difficult because students are unprepared to comprehend primary articles. Learning to read and…