Indoor days

Winter days can be long and dreary, causing restless, cranky children. These activities will help to fill the hours with fun, and learning too.Carolyn Haas is co-author of the new bookPurple Cow to the Rescue published by Little, Brown and Co., as well as many other creative activity books for parents, teachers, and children. These activities are excerpted from the bookRecipes For Fun and Learning by Carolyn Haas, Ann Cole, and Betty Weinberger, CBH Publishing, Box 236-D, Glencoe, IL 60022. For a copy of the book, send $4.95 plus $1.00 for postage and handling to the above address.     

Microfluidic system for near-patient extraction and detection of miR-122 microRNA biomarker for drug-induced liver injury diagnostics

Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) results in over 100 000 hospital attendances per year in the UK alone and is a leading cause for the post-marketing withdrawal of new drugs, leading to significant financial losses. MicroRNA-122 (miR-122) has been proposed as a sensitive DILI marker although no commercial applications are available yet. Extracellular blood microRNAs (miRNAs) are promising clinical biomarkers but their measurement at point of care remains time-consuming, technically challenging, and expensive. For circulating miRNA to have an impact on healthcare, a key challenge to overcome is the development of rapid and reliable low-cost sample preparation. There is an acknowledged issue with miRNA stability in the presence of hemolysis and platelet activation, and no solution has been demonstrated for fast and robust extraction at the site of blood draw. Here, we report a novel microfluidic platform for the extraction of circulating miR-122 from blood enabled by a vertical approach and gravity-based bubble mixing. The performance of this disposable cartridge was verified by standard quantitative polymerase chain reaction analysis on extracted miR-122. The cartridge performed equivalently or better than standard bench extraction kits. The extraction cartridge was combined with electrochemical impedance spectroscopy to detect miR-122 as an initial proof-of-concept toward an application in point-of-care detection. This platform enables the standardization of sample preparation and the detection of miRNAs at the point of blood draw and in resource limited settings and could aid the introduction of miRNA-based assays into routine clinical practice.     

English Composition by Workshop

This study was designed to determine the effectiveness of intensive in-class guidance of daily writing practice in freshman English composition courses as opposed to the presently practiced procedures in the course. The study involved 568 themes written by 142 students enrolled in six classes at UWM. Four groups were taught according to a workshop method developed by two instructors in English and an educational psychologist. Two groups were taught according to the procedures outlined in the freshman composition syllabus. An evaluation chart was developed by the three instructors and four complete sets of themes were graded once each by three raters. The hypothesis–there will be a significant difference in the grade achievement on selected freshmen English essays based on differences in instructional procedures between two control and four experimental groups–was supported. Since major variables of initial superiority of any writing group, variation in grading practices, and effect on students of theme assignments per se were not shown to be significant, it was concluded that the instructional procedures affected the grade achievement of the groups involved.