Features

Editor’s Note: This article is the final installment in a series describing one NCI at Frederick parent’s perspective on special needs parenting. Part one can be found here, and part two can be found here.

Parents of special-needs children do their best to help their kids thrive in typical society, but at times this can be challenging. For instance, I want my son, Harrison, to be able to participate in as many activities as he would like—but this can involve more than just signing him up and paying the registration fee. Fortunately, with a flexible approach and some simple tools, we have found that Harrison can still enjoy “normal” activities. Sometimes, all it takes is an honest conversation.

A winner has emerged in the most recent Poster Puzzler contest! Congratulations are in order for Rose Bradley, secretary III, Cancer Research Technology Program.

The current Poster Puzzler image shows the refrigerant condensers for the two story freezers in the Building 1073 repository, which are used to store samples at -20°C. Put simply, the condensers act like the outdoor unit on a home AC system.

Editor’s note: This article is written as a reflection on experiential STEM education by a student who completed her Werner H. Kirsten internship in June 2015. Here, she advocates for incorporating hands-on experience into STEM curricula.

If the only way for high school students to learn science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is through textbooks, then count me out. But how then do you get students to learn STEM outside of the classroom? The focus of this article is to advocate for high school STEM education through experiential learning.

Tom Freston, one of the founders and the chief executive officer (CEO) of MTV Productions, said in an interview in Men’s Journal that “innovation is taking two things that already exist and...

To be gratuitously loquacious will probably obfuscate.

Huh? Oh, sorry. Let me try that again. The unnecessary use of flowery language is likely to confuse the listener and interfere with understanding.

Was that dumbing the message down? I don’t think so—it took a few more words, but it was probably clearer.

Your challenge is to correctly identify the item and its location from the picture. Clue: It’s somewhere at the NCI campus at Frederick or Fort Detrick.

Win a framed photograph of the Poster Puzzler and have your photo featured on the Poster website by e-mailing your guess, along with your name, e-mail address, and daytime phone number, to poster@mail.nih.gov.

All entries must be received by Friday, February 12, 2016, and the winner will be drawn from all correct answers received by that date.

Good luck and good hunting!

The current Poster Puzzler image shows the top of Building 560, where a new supply air handler was recently installed by Facilities Maintenance and Engineering (FME) staff, as part of lab renovations in wing 1, floor 1. FME staff enlarged the attic of the building to make space for the air handler. Building 560, the largest building at the NCI at Frederick campus, houses about 120 labs and has 19 air handlers.

A supply air handler draws in outside air, filters it, cools or heats it, and adjusts the humidity to provide clean conditioned air to the laboratories. The Building 560 air handler weighs approximately 22,500 pounds and moves 22,000 cubic feet of air per minute.

It looks like we stumped you. We did not receive any correct guesses for the current Poster Puzzler, which is an image of the top of the Building 434 picnic table, with a view looking towards Building 472. This picnic table and others across campus were supplied by the NCI at Frederick Campus Improvement Committee.

Building 434, located on Wood Street, is home to the staff of Scientific Publications, Graphics & Media (SPGM), the Central Repository, and the NCI Experimental Therapeutics Program support group, Applied and Developmental Research Directorate.

Editor’s note: This article is the second in a series describing one NCI at Frederick parent’s perspective on special needs parenting.

Many people living and working in the Washington, D.C., metro area have learned to speak the special language of acronyms, whether they are referring to the federal government, political groups, or other organizations.

Your challenge is to correctly identify the item and its location from the picture below. Clue: It’s somewhere at the NCI campus at Frederick or Fort Detrick.

Win a framed photograph of the Poster Puzzler and have your photo featured on the Poster website by e-mailing your guess, along with your name, e-mail address, and daytime phone number, to poster@mail.nih.gov.

All entries must be received by Friday, May 15, 2015, and the winner will be drawn from all correct answers received by that date.

Good luck and good hunting!

By Frank Blanchard, Staff Writer; photos by Frank Blanchard and Richard Frederickson, Staff Photographer

Each day at 6 a.m. the lights pop on inside 18 buildings on the NCI at Frederick campus, illuminating the residential quarters for thousands of research mice. For the mice, it’s the end of their nocturnal day.  For their caretakers, however, the day has just begun.