Osteoporosis is a skeletal disease characterized by bone loss and bone microarchitectural deterioration. The combination of smart materials and stem cells represents a new therapeutic approach. In the present study, highly porous scaffolds are prepared by combining the conducting polymer PEDOT:PSS with collagen type I, the most abundant protein in bone. The inclusion of collagen proves to be an effective way to modulate their mechanical properties and it induces an increase in scaffolds’ electrochemical impedance. The biomimetic scaffolds support neural crest-derived stem cell osteogenic differentiation, with no need for scaffold pre-conditioning contrarily to other reports.

Does excluding food and energy prices from the Consumer Price Index (CPI) produce a measure that better captures permanent price changes? To examine this question, we decompose CPI inflation and “core” inflation into their permanent and transitory components, using a correlated unobserved-components model. The stationarity of inflation may be time-varying, so we examine the performance of the core measure of inflation separately for periods in which inflation is I(1) and I(0). For a period in which inflation appears to be I(1), we find that core inflation and the permanent component of overall inflation are closely related, but there are some caveats. For a period in which inflation appears to be I(0), we decompose the core and overall price levels and find that the permanent component of the core CPI is much more volatile than the actual core series and that the core excludes volatile permanent shocks to the overall price level.

Information Literacy (IL) has been defined by the ACRL as the ability to identify, access, evaluate, and apply information in an ethical manner. However, IL skills are not an ossified set of behaviors, and IL skills cannot evolve in an intellectual vacuum, without the content that allows for such skills to emerge from practice. As such, IL should be contextualized within the structures and modes of thought of particular disciplines. In response, a burgeoning IL in law movement has arisen, applying the standards of identification, accessing, evaluation, application, and ethical analyses to legal information and the research methods and tools unique to the practice of law. This article traces the development of this movement in three distinct jurisdictions: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Turkey.

As the practice of law crosses national (and linguistic) borders with increasing frequency, the need for tools that facilitate the transnational practice of law becomes more acute. Bilingual legal dictionaries (BLDs) are one critical such tool, as they offer access to legal systems as well as the languages of these systems. Unfortunately, librarians have offered scant criticism of BLDs, many of which are not particularly useful. This article summarizes critical problems with BLDs and offers an approach to resolving these problems by focusing upon the quality of the entries, or definitions, that BLDs provide.

The debate regarding whether the origin of Louisiana civil law is based in the Spanish or in the French legal tradition has been ongoing since that state's incorporation into the United States as a result of the Louisiana Purchase. Distinguished legal scholars have argued in favor of one tradition being dominant over the other, and each has been staunch in support of that view. This article proposes and demonstrates that the Spanish, not French, civil law had an enormous influence on the creation and evolution of Louisiana civil law, and that this legacy resonates today.

Medical education often presents new material as large data dumps at a single live event (lecture or symposium), in part because it is traditional, and also because this structure can be perceived as the most time efficient for busy clinicians and their teachers. However, modern learning theory and new insights from the neurobiological basis of long-term memory formation show that the format of single-event presentation of materials is not very effective. Rather, seeing the presentation of new materials over time, in bite-sized chunks, and then seeing them again at a later time, particularly as a test, leads to more retention of information than does learning the same amount of material as a large bolus in a single setting. This notion of learning over time, also called “interval learning” or “spaced learning,” is particularly well adapted to the Internet era. Here we describe an application of this concept to the learning of psychopharmacology over time in bite-sized and repeated portions structured as an “online fellowship” called the Master Psychopharmacology Program (www.neiglobal.com/mpptour).