The A﹠P Professor Science & Education Updates - Issue #208

Life Science

A team of researchers from Purdue University claim to have discovered the basic "chemistry behind the origin of life" on Earth — in droplets of water.

Scientists at the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London have discovered that mitochondrial DNA can make its way into nuclear DNA. The study is published in Nature.

Jing Hughes, an endocrinologist at Washington University in St. Louis, was working late in the lab recently, imaging cilia in mouse pancreatic beta cells.

Fentanyl is up to 100 times more potent than morphine and many times that of heroin. Drug users generally don’t know when their heroin is laced with fentanyl, so when they inject their usual quantity of heroin, they can inadvertently take a deadly dose of the substance. Read more from STAT.

The earliest studies of genetic inheritance were very straightforward - Gregor Mendel documented the passage of certain easily observable traits as they | Genetics And Genomics

The color red is not particularly strong in terms of the strength of gamma oscillations it generates in the brain.

An app is allowing thousands of people to upload their heart sounds, which could one day allow home diagnosis of heart conditions

The offering, called Device Connect for Fitbit, is one of the first joint public initiatives since Google acquired Fitbit in 2021.

Teaching & Learning

Collaborative group work is increasingly prioritized across higher education, particularly in the life sciences and STEM-related fields. But how students communicate within these smaller groups is key to their success. New research suggests that students who understand what they do and do not know, and who are willing to ask for clarification and correct misinformation in the group, are more successful in small-group problem-solving.

TAPP News & Notes

Krista Rompolski chats with host Kevin Patton about student & instructor preference for a combined or split anatomy & physiology sequence.