Bob to Jim, 21 January 1957

Professional correspondenc

Branching Out to Meet the Needs of Our Students: A Model for Oral Communication Assessment and Curriculum Programs

Two of the multiple primary tasks facing post-secondary institutions across the country are revisiting and revitalizing general education or core programs and developing appropriate techniques for assessing the value of these programs. Following years of development and refinement, Western Carolina University has created an oral communication general education program that not only meets the needs of individual students, but also encouraged consistency across the curriculum emphasizing and assessing the skills learned in the basic course. We have answered the call for revisitation and reform regarding the best pedagogical and epistemological strategies for developing competent communicators, and our results have been positive. This article presents the development and implementation of this program

An investigation into the feasibility of myoglobin-based single-electron transistors

Myoglobin single-electron transistors were investigated using nanometer- gap platinum electrodes fabricated by electromigration at cryogenic temperatures. Apomyoglobin (myoglobin without heme group) was used as a reference. The results suggest single electron transport is mediated by resonant tunneling with the electronic and vibrational levels of the heme group in a single protein. They also represent a proof-of-principle that proteins with redox centers across nanometer-gap electrodes can be utilized to fabricate single-electron transistors. The protein orientation and conformation may significantly affect the conductance of these devices. Future improvements in device reproducibility and yield will require control of these factors

Global-Scale Consequences of Magnetic-Helicity Injection and Condensation on the Sun

In the recent paper of Antiochos, a new concept for the injection of magnetic helicity into the solar corona by small-scale convective motions and its condensation onto polarity inversion lines (PILs) has been developed. We investigate this concept through global simulations of the Sun's photospheric and coronal magnetic fields and compare the results with the hemispheric pattern of solar filaments. Assuming that the vorticity of the cells is predominately counter-clockwise/clockwise in the northern/southern hemisphere, the convective motions inject negative/positive helicity into each hemisphere. The simulations show that: (i) On a north-south orientated PIL, both differential rotation and convective motions inject the same sign of helicity which matches that required to reproduce the hemispheric pattern of filaments. (ii) On a high latitude east-west orientated polar crown or sub-polar crown PIL, the vorticity of the cells has to be approximately 2-3 times greater than the local differential rotation gradient in order to overcome the incorrect sign of helicity injection from differential rotation. (iii) In the declining phase of the cycle, as a bipole interacts with the polar field, in some cases helicity condensation can reverse the effect of differential rotation along the East-West lead arm, but not in all cases. The results show that this newly developed concept of magnetic helicity injection and condensation is a viable method to explain the hemispheric pattern of filaments in conjunction with the mechanisms used in Yeates et al. (2008). Future observational studies should focus on determining the vorticity component within convective motions to determine, both its magnitude and latitudinal variation relative to the differential rotation gradient on the Sun