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Explicit instruction on the skill of creating mental imagery from text supports reading comprehension and recall. This article shares a strategy for teaching students how to process what they read by comparing mental imagery to “brain movies.” It emphasizes choosing appropriate fiction and nonfiction texts to encourage readers to build the skill of creating mental imagery, and offers examples from two classrooms on how students use brain movies to make meaning from what they read.

Most if not all of end-of-life care for people living in long-term care facilities is provided within the facility. This type of care is likely to increase with population ageing. This paper presents a literature review of the published literature on end-of-life care in long-term care facilities such as nursing homes, aged care facilities, residential care homes and continuing care settings, published between 2000 and 2004. A subset of literature that focuses on the development of practice and the identification of interventions to promote the provision of end-of-life care in care homes is examined in detail. Twenty-five papers are identified and these address modes of service delivery, the introduction of ‘interventions’ that facilitate care for individuals, and the development of tools. This work remains largely descriptive. Small-scale work dominates, reflecting the initial stages of knowledge development in this area of work. Suggestions for ways to expand the scope of the end-of-life care development work in long-term care settings are presented, as it is time to expand the horizons of these initiatives to become more rigorous and responsive to the needs of older people and their families in this care setting.

The work presented here discusses a new technique for preparing silk fibers and films with persistent antimicrobial activity through use of metallic dyestuffs during the fiber dyeing process. The length of the silk fibers investigated contracted when the fibers were immersed in concentrated neutral salt solutions, such as calcium or potassium nitrate, at elevated temperature levels. The birefringence and molecular orientation of the silk fibroin molecules became less ordered by the action of the neutral salt solutions, resulting in increased dyestuff absorption. Subsequently, contracted silk fibers were dyed with metallic dyestuffs containing Cr or Cu for the purpose of obtaining silk fibers with antimicrobial activity. Silk fibers dyed with metallic dyestuffs showed significant antimicrobial activity against the plant pathogen Cornebacterium and the human pathogen Coli bacillus. Tensile strength of the silk fibers after the salt shrinking and dyeing processes did not show a significant change, whereas the elongation at break was increased slightly. The techniques described here for preparing significantly active antimicrobial silk fibers are effective and economic ways of providing new materials for industrial and biomedical applications. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 86: 1181–1188, 2002

We have isolated and sequenced a mouse brain cDNA encoding Ca 2+ /calmodulin-dependent protein kinase IV. The sequence predicts an acidic protein (pI = 4.56) of 469 amino acids ( M r = 52 627) that contains kinase catalytic and calmodulin-binding domains. The carboxy region has several primary structural features that suggest it may be a readily cleaved attachment domain. This region is highly charged and hydrophilic and contains several PEST sequences, motifs associated with high turnover proteins. Of the tissues examined, expression of the CaM kinase IV gene is restricted to brain and testis, where transcripts are differentially expressed to produce a kinase in both tissues and a calmodulin-binding protein, calspermin, in testis that lacks a kinase catalytic domain. Ca 2+ ; Calmodulin; Protein kinase; cDNA; Brain; Testis