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Objective: To explore benefits and challenges experienced by residents and faculty when teaching in virtual settings. Methods: This was a qualitative descriptive study employing one-on-one semi-structured interviews with 10 residents and 12 faculty in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Alberta, Canada, from May 2021 to May 2022. Participants were recruited via social media, resident and department events and email lists. Interview transcripts were analyzed descriptively and thematically employing the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) framework to map the identified benefits and challenges as facilitators and barriers to fulfilling teacher's basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness in virtual settings. Results: Resident and faculty participants used virtual technology not only to deliver education, but also leveraged various platform features to support their needs in virtual settings. The emerging themes within benefits and challenges of virtual teaching were amenable to mapping onto three basic psychological needs of the SDT framework - autonomy (e.g., increased accessibility; lack of control over teaching environment), competence (e.g., increased self-confidence; technological limitations hindering skill development), and relatedness (e.g., timely exchange of information; difficulty with professional identity formation). Conclusions: Despite the inherent challenges, teaching in virtual settings can support teachers' psychological needs. Recommendations for the future delivery and facilitation of virtual learning include: giving high priority to engagement and active participation; nurturing autonomy and greater individual responsibility for learning; and creating an environment of emotional support. The SDT-informed strategies shown to be effective in in-person teaching need to be examined for their applicability in virtual settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study determines whether ingestion of a multinutrient supplement containing 3 tricarboxylic-acid-cycle intermediates and other substances potentially supporting the tricarboxylic-acid-cycle (TCA) cycle would improve cyclists time to exhaustion during a sub maximal endurance-exercise test. Oral consumption of a dietary sport supplement containing 3 TCA intermediates did not improve cycling performance at 75% VO(sub 2peak) or speed recovery from previously fatiguing exercise.

Microbial strains with high genomic stability are particularly sought after for testing the quality of commercial microbiological products, such as biological media and antibiotics. Yet, using mutation–accumulation experiments and de novo assembled complete genomes based on Nanopore long-read sequencing, we find that the widely used quality-control strain Shewanella putrefaciens ATCC-8071, also a facultative pathogen, is a hypermutator, with a base-pair substitution mutation rate of 2.42 × 10−8 per nucleotide site per cell division, ∼146-fold greater than that of the wild-type strain CGMCC-1.6515. Using complementation experiments, we confirm that mutL dysfunction, which was a recent evolutionary event, is the cause for the high mutation rate of ATCC-8071. Further analyses also give insight into possible relationships between mutation and genome evolution in this important bacterium. This discovery of a well-known strain being a hypermutator necessitates screening the mutation rate of bacterial strains before any quality control or experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter applies social-psychological theory and research about decision making to separation and divorce. The chapter describes the stages in obtaining a stable decision and the typical coping patterns, most of which are dysfunctional, persons experience who are involved in decisional conflict. The article seeks to normalize the typical problems encountered at this time of stress and suggests clinical interventions related to the psychodynamics of decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The first record of killer whale (Orcinus orca) predation on false killer whales (Pseudorca crassidens) is reported here. On 25 March 2010, a group of 50 to 60 false killer whales, including approximately 15 calves and accompanied by three to five bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops sp.), were sighted in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand. Within 30 min, they were approached by a group of approximately eight killer whales. Five false killer whales were attacked, with at least three rammed from below, forcing them out of the water. After 29 min, the killer whales were milling at the surface and feeding on the carcass of a false killer whale calf, possibly the only individual killed. The killer whales had prolific fresh and healed oval wounds, which were attributed to cookie cutter shark (Isistius sp.) bites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The purpose of this AM Last Page is to help faculty and postgraduate medical trainees (residents) identify resident teaching opportunities and foster teaching skill development. The Fundamental Teaching Activities (FTA) framework includes three domains in which physicians teach: Clinical Preceptor; Teacher Outside the Clinical Setting; and Educational Leader. Based on interviews with faculty and residents as well as our collective and diverse teaching experience, we adapted the FTA framework to be more applicable to resident teaching. The resultant domains are: Clinical Teacher; Teacher in Nonclinical Settings; and Educational Collaborator., (Copyright © 2024 the Association of American Medical Colleges.)

Understanding how mutations affect survivability is a key component to knowing how organisms and complex traits evolve. However, most mutations have a minor effect on fitness and these effects are difficult to resolve using traditional molecular techniques. Therefore, there is a dire need for more accurate and precise fitness measurements methods. Here, we measured the fitness effects in Burkholderia cenocepacia HI2424 mutation accumulation (MA) lines using droplet-digital polymerase chain reaction (ddPCR). Overall, the fitness measurements from ddPCR-MA are correlated positively with fitness measurements derived from traditional phenotypic marker assays (r = 0.297, P = 0.05), but showed some differences. First, ddPCR had significantly lower measurement variance in fitness (F = 3.78, P < 2.6 × 10-13) in control experiments. Second, the mean fitness from ddPCR-MA measurements were significantly lower than phenotypic marker assays (-0.0041 vs -0.0071, P = 0.006). Consistent with phenotypic marker assays, ddPCR-MA measurements observed multiple (27/43) lineages that significantly deviated from mean fitness, suggesting that a majority of the mutations are neutral or slightly deleterious and intermixed with a few mutations that have extremely large effects. Of these mutations, we found a significant excess of mutations within DNA excinuclease and Lys R transcriptional regulators that have extreme deleterious and beneficial effects, indicating that modifications to transcription and replication may have a strong effect on organismal fitness. This study demonstrates the power of ddPCR as a ubiquitous method for high-throughput fitness measurements in both DNA- and RNA-based organisms regardless of cell type or physiology., (© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Genetics Society of America. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.)