Growth Mindset Affects Elementary Students

This literature review explores how growth mindset affects all elementary students in the classroom. The review begins by defining growth mindset and describing the benefits of implementing growth mindset into classrooms and schools. Growth mindset is defined in research as, the ability to believe that the most basic activities can be developed through hard work and dedication. Several steps are listed to implement growth mindset into both classrooms and schools. The review goes on to identify how growth mindset affects all students: typical developing students, talented and gifted students, and special education students. Within each subcategory ideas are given to readers to support the growth mindset philosophy based on the needs of the learners. The review describes how to approach the various learners from a growth mindset point of view. Research based tools and resources are provided to give readers multiple ways to implement and support the growth mindset philosophy in both their classroom and school

Estimating Energy with the Generalized ManyBody Expansion Method for an Atmospheric Nucleation System

Fragment-based estimation methods are very useful for determining the energy of chemical systems, because it gets increasingly less possible to calculate the actual energy of a system as it increases in size. The many-body expansion method accomplishes this by combining sums of energies of smaller fragments of a system into terms which account for the energy of fragments, and the energies of the interactions between fragments. In this project, 2 variations of the many-body expansion method were performed on a NH3(H2O)3 system undergoing several proton transfer reactions. The 3-body method was able to estimate the energy of the NH3(H2O)3 system being studied with a mean absolute error of 1.21 kcal/mol. This estimate appeared to follow the same trends as the actual energy of the system. The 2-body method was able to estimate the energy of the system with a mean absolute error of 9.123 kcal/mol and did not appear to follow the same trends as the actual energy. The 2-body estimate appears to perform worse when atoms are close to being between multiple fragments while it is not clear what causes the variance in performance for the 3-body method.https://openriver.winona.edu/urc2019/1036/thumbnail.jp

Interaction of the 89K murine cytomegalovirus immediate-early protein with core histones

The conditions that permit the interaction of immediate-early proteins of murine cytornegalovirus (MCMV) with DNA were studied. Chromatography of extracts from infected cells on MCMV DNA cellulose and calf thymus DNA cellulose showed that pp89, the regulatory major immediate-early protein, interacts with DNA and dissociates at salt concentrations between 0.3 and 0.6 M NaCl. pp76, a cleavage product of pp89, and additional minor ie1 proteins eluted already at low ionic strength. Cellular DNA-binding factors were required for association of pp89 with DNA. These factors were identified as core histones. Chromatography of IE proteins on histone-Sepharose in the absence of DNA revealed a high-binding affinity that was resistant to 2 M NaCl. These results suggest that pp89 has no direct DNA-binding activity. A role for an amino acid sequence homology in the N-terminal region of pp89 with histone H2B in the pp89-histone-DNA Interaction is discussed

Assessing and Communicating Climate and Water Ecosystem Services of the City of Ann Arbor Greenbelt Program

The Open Space and Parkland Preservation Millage was approved by the residents of Ann Arbor in November 2003 as a way to protect productive farmland, prevent the destruction of natural landscapes, and preserve the rural character surrounding Ann Arbor. Commonly known as the Greenbelt Program, the millage provides funds to preserve and protect open space, farmland, natural habitats, and the City’s source waters inside and outside the city limits. More than halfway through the 30-year millage in 2021, the Greenbelt Program consists of over 6,200 acres of protected land on more than 70 parcels. While successful, the program lacks adequate ways to report impact and motivate support beyond acres preserved and funds leveraged. Like many organizations working to protect land, they are in need of additional ways to assess and communicate more meaningful measures of conservation value, such as quantifying ecosystem services. Our goal was to develop a series of dynamic geoprocessing tools to quantify specific ecosystem service value of the Greenbelt’s current portfolio of properties and any new properties added in the future. This will allow the City staff and residents of Ann Arbor to have an ongoing understanding of and ability to communicate the value of individual properties and entire land conservation programs. We focused on two categories of ecosystem services: (1) above and belowground carbon storage and (2) water quality.Master of ScienceSchool for Environment and SustainabilityUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/167368/3/A2Greenbelt_376_Final_Report.pd

Making Vaccines On Demand

The integrated US Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise (PHEMCE) has made great strides in strategic preparedness and response capabilities. There have been numerous advances in planning, biothreat countermeasure development, licensure, manufacturing, stockpiling and deployment. Increased biodefense surveillance capability has dramatically improved, while new tools and increased awareness have fostered rapid identification of new potential public health pathogens. Unfortunately, structural delays in vaccine design, development, manufacture, clinical testing and licensure processes remain significant obstacles to an effective national biodefense rapid response capability. This is particularly true for the very real threat of “novel pathogens” such as the avian-origin influenzas H7N9 and H5N1, and new coronaviruses such as hCoV-EMC. Conventional approaches to vaccine development, production, clinical testing and licensure are incompatible with the prompt deployment needed for an effective public health response. An alternative approach, proposed here, is to apply computational vaccine design tools and rapid production technologies that now make it possible to engineer vaccines for novel emerging pathogen and WMD biowarfare agent countermeasures in record time. These new tools have the potential to significantly reduce the time needed to design string-of-epitope vaccines for previously unknown pathogens. The design process—from genome to gene sequence, ready to insert in a DNA plasmid—can now be accomplished in less than 24 h. While these vaccines are by no means “standard,” the need for innovation in the vaccine design and production process is great. Should such vaccines be developed, their 60-d start-to-finish timeline would represent a 2-fold faster response than the current standard

Radiation Therapy Combined With Checkpoint Blockade Immunotherapy for Metastatic Undifferentiated Pleomorphic Sarcoma of the Maxillary Sinus With a Complete Response

Background: Undifferentiated pleomorphic sarcoma (UPS) of the maxillary sinus is an extremely rare malignancy of the head and neck. Surgery is the mainstay of treatment for UPS; however, proximity to vital structures makes it challenging to achieve negative surgical margins. Adjuvant therapy including radiation therapy with or without chemotherapy is generally indicated. Despite advances in multimodality treatment, objective response rates to available therapies and prognosis of metastatic UPS remain dismal. Immunotherapy has become a fourth cornerstone of cancer therapy and checkpoint blockade immunotherapy is a standard of care for recurrent or metastatic cisplatin-refractory head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. Checkpoint blockade immunotherapy is being studied in metastatic sarcoma, including UPS, and while initial results are promising, objective response rates remain below 20%. However, adding radiation therapy to checkpoint blockade immunotherapy has been shown, in both preclinical and retrospective clinical studies, to have combinatorial effects on both local and metastatic disease. Thus, further investigation into the effects of radiation therapy combined with immunotherapy in head and neck sarcomas is warranted.Case Presentation: We present a case of metastatic, chemotherapy-refractory, UPS of the maxillary sinus in a 55-year-old male treated with checkpoint blockade immunotherapy combined with radiation, which resulted in a complete response.Conclusions: This is the first report to our knowledge of metastatic UPS treated with a combination of radiation and dual agent checkpoint blockade immunotherapy. Further investigation is warranted to study the effects of this combination in patients with metastatic UPS that fail to respond to currently available therapies