Challenging Authority: The Impact of Practicing Nursing in the Legislature.

How does challenging authority look? This article describes two steps taken to prepare for and engage in challenges to existing laws. The first step is use of the nursing process to help structure deliberations about when to pursue, justify, and target a challenge to existing law to create desired outcomes. The second step is the important process of building the case for change and the broad base of support needed to push against resistance to change.

Confronting the barriers to health care reform.

Reforming health care is made more difficult when attention is successfully directed away from the root causes of increasing health care disparity and inflation. This article challenges nurses to accept an active role in health care reform as a part of professional responsibility.

A thermally re-mendable cross-linked polymeric material.

We have developed a transparent organic polymeric material that can repeatedly mend or "re-mend" itself under mild conditions. The material is a tough solid at room temperature and below with mechanical properties equaling those of commercial epoxy resins. At temperatures above 120 degrees C, approximately 30% (as determined by solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy) of "intermonomer" linkages disconnect but then reconnect upon cooling, This process is fully reversible and can be used to restore a fractured part of the polymer multiple times, and it does not require additional ingredients such as a catalyst, additional monomer, or special surface treatment of the fractured interface.

The monolayer thickness dependence of quantized double-layer capacitances of monolayer-protected gold clusters.

This report describes how the electrochemical double-layer capacitances of nanometer-sized alkanethiolate monolayer-protected Au clusters (MPCs) dissolved in electrolyte solution depend on the alkanethiolate chain length (C4 to C16). The double-layer capacitances of individual MPCs (C(CLU)) are sufficiently small (sub-attoFarad, aF) that their metal core potentials change by >0.1 V increments for single electron transfers at the electrode/solution interface.