Connected While Distant: Networking CUREs Across Classrooms to Create Community and Empower Students.

Connections, collaborations, and community are key to the success of individual scientists as well as transformative scientific advances. Intentionally building these components into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education can better prepare future generations of researchers. Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are a new, fast-growing teaching practice in STEM that expand opportunities for undergraduate students to gain research skills.

March Mammal Madness and the power of narrative in science outreach.

March Mammal Madness is a science outreach project that, over the course of several weeks in March, reaches hundreds of thousands of people in the United States every year. We combine four approaches to science outreach - gamification, social media platforms, community event(s), and creative products - to run a simulated tournament in which 64 animals compete to become the tournament champion. While the encounters between the animals are hypothetical, the outcomes rely on empirical evidence from the scientific literature.

Ambient temperature-mediated changes in hepatic gene expression of a mammalian herbivore (Neotoma lepida).

Herbivores regularly ingest natural toxins produced by plants as a defence against herbivory. Recent work suggests that compound toxicity is exacerbated at higher ambient temperatures. This phenomenon, known as temperature-dependent toxicity (TDT), is the likely result of decreased liver function at warmer temperatures; however, the underlying cause of TDT remains speculative.