Classroom Management and Remote Teaching: Tools for Defining and Teaching Expectations

The remote instruction context presents many challenges for teachers, including managing student behavior. The practice of defining and teaching expectations is considered a high-leverage practice in special education, and should be applied to the remote setting to support the learning of students with and without disabilities. We present four recommended steps for adapting this practice for the remote setting and use a fictional vignette with example materials to demonstrate the process. Additionally, we provide other useful online resources for providing effective online instruction for students with disabilities

Childhood Maltreatment Predicts Poor Economic and Educational Outcomes in the Transition to Adulthood.

ObjectivesTo test whether childhood maltreatment was a predictor of (1) having low educational qualifications and (2) not being in education, employment, or training among young adults in the United Kingdom today.MethodsParticipants were from the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study, a nationally representative UK cohort of 2232 twins born in 1994 to 1995. Mothers reported on child maltreatment when participants were aged 5, 7, 10, and 12 years. Participants were interviewed about their vocational status at age 18 years.ResultsThe unadjusted odds of having low educational qualifications or of not being in education, employment, or training at age 18 years were more than 2 times greater for young people with a childhood history of maltreatment versus those without. These associations were reduced after adjustments for individual and family characteristics. Youths who reported having a supportive adult in their lives had better education outcomes than did youths who had less support.ConclusionsCloser collaboration between the child welfare and education systems is warranted to improve vocational outcomes for maltreated youths

Evaluation of PD-L1 expression on vortex-isolated circulating tumor cells in metastatic lung cancer.

Metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is a highly fatal and immunogenic malignancy. Although the immune system is known to recognize these tumor cells, one mechanism by which NSCLC can evade the immune system is via overexpression of programmed cell death ligand 1 (PD-L1). Recent clinical trials of PD-1 and PD-L1 inhibitors have returned promising clinical responses. Important for personalizing therapy, patients with higher intensity staining for PD-L1 on tumor biopsies responded better. Thus, there has been interest in using PD-L1 tumor expression as a criterion for patient selection. Currently available methods of screening involve invasive tumor biopsy, followed by histological grading of PD-L1 levels. Biopsies have a high risk of complications, and only allow sampling from limited tumor sections, which may not reflect overall tumor heterogeneity. Circulating tumor cell (CTC) PD-L1 levels could aid in screening patients, and could supplement tissue PD-L1 biopsy results by testing PD-L1 expression from disseminated tumor sites. Towards establishing CTCs as a screening tool, we developed a protocol to isolate CTCs at high purity and immunostain for PD-L1. Monitoring of PD-L1 expression on CTCs could be an additional biomarker for precision medicine that may help in determining response to immunotherapies

Low-temperature glassy response of ultrathin La0.8ca0.2Mn03 films to electric and magnetic fields

The glassy response of ultrathin films of La0.8Ca0.2MnO3 in the mixed phase to external magnetic and gated electro-static fields have been studied at low temperatures. The response of the resistance to external fields provides direct evidence for a hierarchical energy landscape, with strong cross-couplings between spin and charge. Magnetic coercivity measurements indicate that strong magnetic disorder accompanies the mixed phase in these films. This magnetic disorder, and the resultant coercivity, can be decreased by cooling in a large magnetic field or by electrostatic gating

Social control of brain morphology in a eusocial mammal

Social status impacts reproductive behavior in diverse vertebrate species, but little is known about how it affects brain morphology. We explore this in the naked mole-rat, a species with the most rigidly organized reproductive hierarchy among mammals. Naked mole-rats live in large, subterranean colonies where breeding is restricted to a single female and small number of males. All other members of the colony, known as subordinates, are reproductively suppressed. Subordinates can become breeders if removed from the colony and placed with an opposite sex partner, but in nature most individuals never attain reproductive status. We examined the brains of breeding and subordinate naked mole-rats of both sexes, including several regions linked to reproduction and shown to be sexually dimorphic in other mammals. Stereological analyses revealed that neural morphology depends on status, such that breeders, regardless of sex, had more cells than subordinates in the ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus and a larger volume of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, paraventricular nucleus, and medial amygdala. Several other brain regions examined were unaffected. Surprisingly, males and females did not differ on any measure. These findings provide evidence that a change in social status triggers considerable neural remodeling and indicate that status, rather than sex, has a predominant role in determining neural structure in this remarkably social mammal

Classification of large circulating tumor cells isolated with ultra-high throughput microfluidic Vortex technology.

Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are emerging as rare but clinically significant non-invasive cellular biomarkers for cancer patient prognosis, treatment selection, and treatment monitoring. Current CTC isolation approaches, such as immunoaffinity, filtration, or size-based techniques, are often limited by throughput, purity, large output volumes, or inability to obtain viable cells for downstream analysis. For all technologies, traditional immunofluorescent staining alone has been employed to distinguish and confirm the presence of isolated CTCs among contaminating blood cells, although cells isolated by size may express vastly different phenotypes. Consequently, CTC definitions have been non-trivial, researcher-dependent, and evolving. Here we describe a complete set of objective criteria, leveraging well-established cytomorphological features of malignancy, by which we identify large CTCs. We apply the criteria to CTCs enriched from stage IV lung and breast cancer patient blood samples using the High Throughput Vortex Chip (Vortex HT), an improved microfluidic technology for the label-free, size-based enrichment and concentration of rare cells. We achieve improved capture efficiency (up to 83%), high speed of processing (8 mL/min of 10x diluted blood, or 800 μL/min of whole blood), and high purity (avg. background of 28.8±23.6 white blood cells per mL of whole blood). We show markedly improved performance of CTC capture (84% positive test rate) in comparison to previous Vortex designs and the current FDA-approved gold standard CellSearch assay. The results demonstrate the ability to quickly collect viable and pure populations of abnormal large circulating cells unbiased by molecular characteristics, which helps uncover further heterogeneity in these cells

The Challenges of First-in-Human Stem Cell Clinical Trials: What Does This Mean for Ethics and Institutional Review Boards?

Stem cell-based clinical interventions are increasingly advancing through preclinical testing and approaching clinical trials. The complexity and diversity of these approaches, and the confusion created by unproven and untested stem cell-based "therapies," create a growing need for a more comprehensive review of these early-stage human trials to ensure they place the patients at minimal risk of adverse events but are also based on solid evidence of preclinical efficacy with a clear scientific rationale for that effect. To address this issue and supplement the independent review process, especially that of the ethics and institutional review boards who may not be experts in stem cell biology, the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) has developed a set of practical questions to cover the major issues for which clear evidence-based answers need to be obtained before approving a stem cell-based trial

Ongoing quality control in digital radiography: Report of AAPM Imaging Physics Committee Task Group 151

Quality control (QC) in medical imaging is an ongoing process and not just a series of infrequent evaluations of medical imaging equipment. The QC process involves designing and implementing a QC program, collecting and analyzing data, investigating results that are outside the acceptance levels for the QC program, and taking corrective action to bring these results back to an acceptable level. The QC process involves key personnel in the imaging department, including the radiologist, radiologic technologist, and the qualified medical physicist (QMP). The QMP performs detailed equipment evaluations and helps with oversight of the QC program, the radiologic technologist is responsible for the day-to-day operation of the QC program. The continued need for ongoing QC in digital radiography has been highlighted in the scientific literature. The charge of this task group was to recommend consistency tests designed to be performed by a medical physicist or a radiologic technologist under the direction of a medical physicist to identify problems with an imaging system that need further evaluation by a medical physicist, including a fault tree to define actions that need to be taken when certain fault conditions are identified. The focus of this final report is the ongoing QC process, including rejected image analysis, exposure analysis, and artifact identification. These QC tasks are vital for the optimal operation of a department performing digital radiography

The pale orange dot : the spectrum and habitability of hazy Archean Earth

Recognizing whether a planet can support life is a primary goal of future exoplanet spectral characterization missions, but past research on habitability assessment has largely ignored the vastly different conditions that have existed in our planet's long habitable history. This study presents simulations of a habitable yet dramatically different phase of Earth's history, when the atmosphere contained a Titan-like, organic-rich haze. Prior work has claimed a haze-rich Archean Earth (3.8–2.5 billion years ago) would be frozen due to the haze's cooling effects. However, no previous studies have self-consistently taken into account climate, photochemistry, and fractal hazes. Here, we demonstrate using coupled climate-photochemical-microphysical simulations that hazes can cool the planet's surface by about 20 K, but habitable conditions with liquid surface water could be maintained with a relatively thick haze layer (τ ∼ 5 at 200 nm) even with the fainter young Sun. We find that optically thicker hazes are self-limiting due to their self-shielding properties, preventing catastrophic cooling of the planet. Hazes may even enhance planetary habitability through UV shielding, reducing surface UV flux by about 97% compared to a haze-free planet and potentially allowing survival of land-based organisms 2.7–2.6 billion years ago. The broad UV absorption signature produced by this haze may be visible across interstellar distances, allowing characterization of similar hazy exoplanets. The haze in Archean Earth's atmosphere was strongly dependent on biologically produced methane, and we propose that hydrocarbon haze may be a novel type of spectral biosignature on planets with substantial levels of CO2. Hazy Archean Earth is the most alien world for which we have geochemical constraints on environmental conditions, providing a useful analogue for similar habitable, anoxic exoplanets.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe