Three studies examined the co-existence of natural and supernatural explanations for illness and disease transmission, from a developmental perspective. The participants (5-, 7-, 11-, and 15-year-olds and adults; N = 366) were drawn from 2 Sesotho-speaking South African communities, where Western biomedical and traditional healing frameworks were…

One of the alluring aspects of examining chromatin modifications in the role of modulating transcription required for long-term memory processes is that these modifications may provide transient and potentially stable epigenetic marks in the service of activating and/or maintaining transcriptional processes. These, in turn, may ultimately…

The academic success of students in introductory science courses is influenced by a variety of factors, the most important of which is academic motivation. Students express their levels of academic motivation in many ways, including their class attendance, amount of studying, compliance with assignments, and participation in course-related…

An important aspect of teaching biology is to expose students to the concept of biodiversity. For this purpose, bacteria are excellent examples. The advanced placement (AP) biology class at Cedar Shoals High School in Athens, Georgia, learned how to explore bacterial biodiversity using molecular fingerprinting. They collected marine water samples,…

Teachers' occupational well-being (level of emotional exhaustion and job satisfaction) and quality of instruction are two key aspects of research on teaching that have rarely been studied together. The role of occupational engagement and resilience as two important work-related self-regulatory dimensions that predict occupational well-being and…

A novel one-week intersession lecture-lab hybrid course on nanomaterials is presented. The course provided a combination of background theory and hands-on laboratory experiments to educate students about nanomaterials and nanotechnology. The design of the course, subject matter, and laboratory experiments are discussed. Topics and level were…

As part of an effort to infuse our physical chemistry laboratory with biologically relevant, investigative experiments, we detail four integrated thermodynamic experiments that characterize the denaturation (or unfolding) and self-interaction of hen egg white lysozyme as a function of pH and ionic strength. Students first use Protein Explorer to…

A simple multiday laboratory exercise suitable for use in a high school or community college chemistry course or a biotechnology advanced placement biology course is described. In this experiment students gain experience in the use of column chromatography as a tool for the separation and characterization of biomolecules, thus expanding their…

The movement of newly synthesized proteins through the endomembrane system of eukaryotic cells, often referred to generally as the secretory pathway, is a topic covered in most intermediate-level undergraduate cell biology courses. An article previously published in this journal described a laboratory exercise in which yeast mutants defective in…

The authors have developed and field-tested high school-level curricular materials that guide students to use biology, mathematics, and physics to understand plankton and how these tiny organisms move in a world where their intuition does not apply. The authors chose plankton as the focus of their materials primarily because the challenges faced…

The various ways "nature" and "nurture" interact to shape school pupils' lives are examined from the perspective of recent biologically informed studies. The idea of a highly predictive, genetically based inheritance is strikingly upheld by research in infancy and early childhood. Research evidence also shows how pupil…

We have been teaching applied molecular genetics to engineers and adapted the teaching methodology to the European Credit Transfer System. We teach core principles of genetics that are universal and form the conceptual basis of most molecular technologies. The course then teaches widely used techniques and finally shows how different techniques…

This article describes the sequence alignment problem in bioinformatics. Through examples, we formulate sequence alignment as an optimization problem and show how to compute the optimal alignment with dynamic programming. The examples and sample exercises have been used by the author in a specialized course in bioinformatics, but could be adapted…

Anyone who has taught a lecture to a large group of students has probably experienced undesirable student behaviors. The author, who has taught an introductory college biology course at Syracuse University for 45 years, relates that an important part of his teaching philosophy is that everyone should learn from everything that they do, and…

Zoos can provide exciting educational opportunities for students to learn about a wide range of science subject matter. Zoos and similar nonschool sites have the added advantage of getting students out of school and into another environment, demonstrating that science learning can take place anywhere--not only in formal school settings. Through…