Cuisine with hot chili peppers can be tasty, but sometimes painful to consume because of the burning sensations caused by the capsaicin molecule. The authors wanted to find the palate reliever that decreases the burning sensation of capsaicin the most by testing water, soft drink, olive oil, milk, and ice-cream as possible candidates. The authors hypothesized that olive oil would be the best palate reliever as it is non-polar like the capsaicin molecule. The authors surveyed 12 panelists with low, medium, and high spice tolerances and found that across all levels of spice tolerance, milk and ice-cream were the best palate relievers and soft drink the worst.

Understanding how bacteria respond to other bacteria could facilitate their ability to initiate and maintain their infectiousness. The phenomenon by which bacteria signal to each other via chemical signals is called quorum sensing, which could be targeted to deter bacterial infection in some cases if better understood. In this article, the authors study how a bacterium called V. fischeri uses quorum sensing to change bioluminescence, an easy readout that facilitates studying quorum sensing in this strain.

Here seeking to identify a possible solution to procrastination among college students, the authors used an online experiment that involved the random assignment of study partners that they shared their study time goal with. These partners were classified by status and group membership. The authors found that status and group membership did not significantly affect the likelihood of college students achieving their committed goals, and also suggest the potential of soft commitment devices that take advantage of social relationships to reduce procrastination.

In a world where plastic waste accumulation is threatening both land and sea life, Green et al. investigate the ability of mealworms to breakdown polystyrene, a non-recyclable form of petrochemical-based polymer we use in our daily lives. They confirm that these organisms, can degrade various forms of polystyrene, even after it has been put to use in our daily lives. Although the efficiency of the degradation process still requires improvement, the good news is, the worms are tiny and themselves are biodegradable, so we can use plenty of them without worrying about space and how to get rid of them. This is very promising and certainly good news for the planet.

The electronic health record (EHR), along with its mobile application, has demonstrated the ability to improve the efficiency and accuracy of health care delivery. This study included data from 874 health care providers over a 12-month period regarding their usage of mobile phone (EPIC® Haiku) and tablet (EPIC® Canto) mEHR. Ambulatory and inpatient care providers had the greatest usage levels over the 12-month period. Awareness of workflow allows for optimization of mEHR design and implementation, which should increase mEHR adoption and usage, leading to better health outcomes for patients.

Here, seeking to better understand the roles of glycans in the receptors of active sites of neuronal cells, the authors used molecular dynamics simulations to to uncover the dynamic nature of N-glycans on membrane proteins. The authors suggest the study of theinteractions of these membrane poreins could provide future potential therapeutic targets to treat mental diseases.

Virtual labs have been gaining popularity over the last few years, especially during the worldwide lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, the suitability of virtual labs for school chemistry experiments is addressed and their effectiveness is compared to traditional physical lab experiments by focusing on physical and human resources, convenience, cost, safety, and time involved as well as topic "matter".

Recently, e-cigarette usage has been increasing rapidly. Previous research has found that adverse
childhood experiences (ACEs) are correlated to cigarette usage. However, there is limited data exploring if ACEs affect vaping. Therefore, in this work, we investigated the effects of ACEs on e-cigarette usage and hypothesize that witnessing vaping in the house and facing ACEs would increase e-cigarette usage while education on the dangers of vaping would decrease e-cigarette usage. We found that different types of ACEs had different correlations with e-cigarette usage and that education on the dangers of vaping had no effect on e-cigarette usage.

Herring and Scott investigated how specific types of background music affected 8th and 9th graders' performance on a reading comprehension task. In the study, their results indicated that music with English lyrics led to lower reading comprehension scores, while foreign language and instrumental music was comparable to no music at all. The authors therefore recommend that teachers avoid playing English language music for students completing reading tasks in order to minimize distractions and improve work efficiency.

This study is centered around developing biofortification methods: the authors test whether the amount of calcium available to growing crops translates into more calcium present in the crops.