Highland Park Public Library

Background: Approximately 30% of fresh produce spoils in its packaging before consumption, impacting the economy and straining environmental resources. The goal of this project is to elucidate a safe and effective solution for extending the post-harvest life of fruit. The benefits of cinnamon extract have been studied in numerous applications, including antimicrobial ones. This study investigates whether infusing an extract of 0.1% cinnamon bark essential oil into pulp fiber produce containers would reduce microbial growth and volume loss associated with fruit spoilage. Methods: Three fresh strawberries were placed in individual pulp fiber containers infused with cinnamon bark extract, and 3 were placed in similar containers without the extract. Strawberries were selected for uniformity in size, color, and state of freshness and were stored in identical environmental conditions. Each strawberry was swabbed for microbes and plated on DRBC agar. Colony counts, photographs, and strawberry weights were recorded daily for 7 days. Results: There was a 57.9% reduction in microbial colony counts in the strawberries stored in containers treated with extract compared to the control group. A greater reduction in weight was seen in the treatment group, likely explained by the added weight of mold growth noted in the control group. Conclusion: This research holds the promise of enhancing food preservation methods safely and effectively, thereby mitigating food waste and ensuring the availability of fresh produce.

Textbooks are using a variety of symbols for expressing codominance or lack of dominance among alleles. One of the most common and yet inconsistent ways is to use the same upper case/lower case system as in a regular dominant/recessive pair, e.g., RR = Red, Rr = Pink, and rr = white. Students are told that this is an example of codominance in which the heterozygous genotype results in a phenotype that is a blend of the two codominant traits. This is inconsistent and confusing. In this note I am proposing a more consistent system.

Public schools have not established an effective track record in serving children with behavioral disorders (BD), especially since many students identified as behaviorally dis ordered have been excluded from their home schools (Walker, Reavis, Rhode, & Jenson, 1985). Surveys of faculty (including teachers, counselors, and school psychologists) con sistently identify the behaviorally disordered child as needing the highest service priority of any of the disabilities (Grosenick & Huntze, 1980). Staffing issues are compounded by a number of programatic concerns delineated by Noel (1982): (a) public school programs may fail to have a common program conceptualization, or they may be implemented inconsistently; (b) segregated, self-contained settings away from the educational main stream are the norm for these children, restricting socialization with normal peer groups; and (c) the social context (with its environmental demands) of the behaviorally disordered child in school often is overlooked.

A cooperative relationship among the members of a school's staff, a long-recommended condi tion, is now imperative if our large high schools are to be living and adaptive organisms. Co operation may be spoken of eloquently and ab stractly, but the quite specific efforts that a particular school system is making to achieve this condition are equally moving testimony to the feasibility and effectiveness of cooperation as the basis of school organization and admin istration.