The following students majoring in our department are winners in their poster sessions at the 16^th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium in the Chemical and Biological Sciences, held at UMBC on Saturday, October 26, 2013.

1^st  Place
BIO-ANALYTICAL METHODS TO DETERMINE ANDROGEN
RECEPTOR O-GLCNACYLATION
Jhullian J. Alston, Jordy J. Hsiao, Brandon H. Ng, Melinda M. Smits, Michael E Summers

BIOLOGY major

1^st Place
INHIBITION OF LUNG TUMOR INITIATION BY RNAI TARGETING WNT
SIGNALING
Sagar Bajpai,Tuomas Tammela ,Tyler Jacks

BIOLOGY major

1^st Place
TESTING FOR FEMALE SONG IN NEWLY RECOGNIZED SPECIES:
THE PUERTO RICAN ORIOLE
Susanna Campbell, Kevin Omland

BIOLOGY major

2^nd Place
BLUNTED RESISTANCE TRAINING-INDUCED MUSCLE REGROWTH
AMONG ATROPHIED OLDER ADULTS IS ASSOCIATED WITH
HEIGHTENED INFLAMMATORY/PROTEOLYTIC SIGNALING
Yu-Rei Raymond Chang, Michael Stec, Marcas Bamman

BIOLOGY major

2^nd Place
CHARACTERIZING THE FORAGING BEHAVIOR OF MALARIA VECTORS
DURING THE WET SEASON IN NCHELENGE, ZAMBIA
Samantha Eng, Smita Das, Laura C. Norris, Douglas E. Norris

BIOCHEM major

1^st Place
CONTRIBUTION OF ELF3 TO THE TLR-DRIVEN CATABOLIC RESPONSES IN
ARTICULAR CHONDROCYTES: POTENTIAL ROLE IN CARTILAGE
DESTRUCTION IN OSTEOARTHRITIS
Catrina Johnson, Miguel Otero, Mary Goldring

BIOLOGY major

2^nd Place

HOW WELL DO SPECIES TREE METHODS DEAL WITH GENE FLOW?   MITOCHONDRIAL INTROGRESSION IN THE NORTHERN ORIOLE COMPLEX

John Malloy, Tylynn Pettrey, Leila Bahmani, Frode Jacobsen, Matthias Gobbert, Kevin Omland.

BIOINFORMATICS major

2^nd Place
TIME-DEPENDENT EFFECT OF OSTEOCHONDRAL FRACTURE ON
HYALURONAN CONCENTRATION IN EQUINE SYNOVIAL FLUID
Elelbin A Ortiz, Michele M Temple-Wong, Ph.D, Christina M Lee, PhD,

BIOCHEM major

2^nd Place
CHARACTERIZATION OF A 3D CELL CULTURE SYSTEM FOR STUDYING
MAMMARY GLAND DEVELOPMENT
Kwadwo Owusu-Boaitey, Ethan Sokol, Piyush Gupta

BIOLOGY major

2^nd Place
SERIAL SECTION ELECTRON MICROGRAPH ALIGNMENT AND
STITCHING IN CONNECTOME RECONSTRUCTION
Talmo Pereira, Ashwin Vishwanathan and Hyunjune Sebastian Seung

BIOCHEM major

1^st Place
THE ROLE OF ADIPONECTIN IN HIGH FAT-MEDIATED
CARDIOPROTECTIVE PROGRAMS
Mashhood Wani, Lauren Haar, Avni Amratia, Christopher Gonzalez, WK Jones

BIOCHEM major

From NIH's website:

NIH Grants Policy Statement (10/1/2013) - Effective for all NIH grants and cooperative agreements with budget periods beginning on or after October 1, 2013. See 10/1/2012 NIHGPS for prior budget periods. See NOT-OD-14-001 for description and notable changes since the 2011 version.  See also the Significant Changes document (PDF - 74 KB) which summarizes the significant changes in this revision of the NIH GPS (also attached here).

On-Campus Interviews offer students a chance to conveniently interview for professional positions on campus.  Employers travel to our campus for the specific purpose of interviewing preselected students for currently open positions.  This is a great opportunity to interview with employers specifically interested in UMBC students and offers the advantage of a smaller applicant pool.  Interviews take place during the fall and spring. The logistics (viewing positions, applying, signing up for interview time slots, etc.) are all handled via UMBCworks.

Don't miss out on employers coming to UMBC to recruit YOU this fall! The following is a list of employers coming to conduct on-campus interviews with application deadlines within the next month.

iGate

Position: Test Engineer - 9261611
Resume Submission End:  November 4, 2013

A full list of On-Campus Interviews scheduled is available on our website calendar and on UMBCworks, please check regularly for any updates or changes that may occur.

The following full-time positions have been posted within the past week to UMBCworks. Login to your account (via the link in the Jobs & Internships topic in myUMBC) and find details and application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings!

9261564 - Blogger/Copywriter/Editor - Flinja
9261652 - Front End Web Designer/Developer - IMS, Inc.
9261687 - Junior Pricing Analyst - Whitney, Bradley and Brown
9261584 - Manufacturing Electrical Engineer 1 - AAI Corporation
9261583 - Research Associate - CoStar Group, Inc.

The following part-time positions have been posted within the past week to UMBCworks. Login to your account (via the link in the Jobs & Internships topic in myUMBC) and find details and application instructions as well as hundreds of other job postings!

9261656 - Anne Arundel County STEM Instructor - YMCA of Central MD
9261562 - Driver - Uber
9261540 - IT Support Specialist - BYK Gardner - USA
9261673 - Chess Coach or Aide - Silver Knights Chess
9260554 - Princess Characters - Thumbs Up Party Planning
9261527 - Welcome Center Staff - Howard County Tourism & Promotion

Sass makes working with media queries pretty excellent. You can nest them right within other blocks of CSS, which puts the properties and values you are changing right next to each other. That creates an obvious connection between them, which is a much nicer authoring experience than trying to maintain those changes separated by tons of other code or in a different file. We've covered this before. It was new in Sass 3.2.

.column-1-3 {
      width: 33.3333%;
      @media (max-width: 600px) {
        width: 100%;
      }
    }

But since we're likely to do that over and over again, we should abstract that media query away like we would any other variable.

$bp-babybear: "(max-width: 600px)";
    
    .column-1-3 {
      width: 33.33%;
      @media #{$bp-babybear} {
        width: 100%;
      }
    }

It's more common to see a @mixin be used though, in conjunction with Sass @content blocks. We covered this in the article Naming Media Queries:

@mixin bp($point) {
      @if $point == papa-bear {
        @media (max-width: 1600px) { @content; }
      }
      @else if $point == mama-bear {
        @media (max-width: 1250px) { @content; }
      }
      @else if $point == baby-bear {
        @media (max-width: 600px)  { @content; }
      }
    }

Which you use like this:

.sidebar {
      width: 33.33%;
      @include bp(baby-bear) {
        width: 100%;
      }
    }

And there is no reason you can't do both, abstracting away the media queries into variables, if you prefer the look of that:

@mixin bp($point) {
      
      $bp-babybear: "(max-width: 600px)";
      $bp-mamabear: "(max-width: 1250px)";
      $bp-papabear: "(max-width: 1600px)";
    
      @if $point == papa-bear {
        @media #{$bp-papabear} { @content; }
      }
      @else if $point == mama-bear {
        @media #{$bp-mamabear} { @content; }
      }
      @else if $point == baby-bear {
        @media #{$bp-babybear}  { @content; }
      }
    
    }

Which has the exact same usage.

As an aside, I like "bp" as a name, because it's something you have to type over and over and it's short and sweet.

At a glance, it seems like the @mixin approach has limited value. Just using a variable is less verbose and makes just as much sense. However with the @mixin, we are granted additional powers!

Perhaps we want to create a version of a stylesheet which contains no media queries at all. This is absolutely reasonable in some circumstances. Perhaps we want to create an IE 8 and down stylesheet. Nicolas Gallagher toyed with using Sass for this years ago, but this is slightly different. IE 8 and down do not natively support media queries so perhaps we decide we're going to serve them a stripped down stylesheet which does not include them at all. Old browsers like that are slower anyway, so instead of punishing them with additional code they can't use, we're helping them by serving them less. Sort of the Universal IE 6 Stylesheet idea.

We can use a combination of conditional comments to do that:

<!--[if !IE 8]><!-->
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
    <!--<![endif]-->
    
    <!--[if gte IE 9]>
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
    <![endif]-->
    
    <!--[if lte IE 8]>
      <link rel="stylesheet" href="style-NoMQs.css">
    <![endif]-->

Another reasonable and real-world reason to serve a stylesheet stripped of media queries is if you have some pages of your site that use responsive design and some pages of your site that have a mobile-specific version. I think that's reasonable. The pages that have a mobile-specific version don't really need those media queries in them.

So how do you create both a style.css and a style-NoMQs.css from the same source Sass? We use the power of our @mixin.

We use a logic condition within the bp @mixin which will either continue and output the media query, or output nothing.

$MQs: true;
    
    @mixin bp($point) {
      @if ($MQs) {
        $bp-babybear: "(max-width: 600px)";
        $bp-mamabear: "(max-width: 1250px)";
        $bp-papabear: "(max-width: 1600px)";
      
        @if $point == papa-bear {
          @media #{$bp-papabear} { @content; }
        }
        @else if $point == mama-bear {
          @media #{$bp-mamabear} { @content; }
        }
        @else if $point == baby-bear {
          @media #{$bp-babybear}  { @content; }
        }
      }
    }

You wouldn't declare that variable right outside the @mixin though. You would declare it from your "master" file that @imports all the partials. So perhaps your style.scss file is:

$MQs: true;
    
    @import "variables";
    @import "colors";
    @import "global";
    /* etc. */

And you create the "No Media Queries" version (style-NoMQs.css) by creating a style-NoMQs.scss:

$MQs: false;
    
    @import "variables";
    @import "colors";
    @import "global";
    /* etc. */

Just change that variable to false, and the output CSS will contain no media queries at all.

Big props to Cat Farman who wrote about this very idea in her Cognition article Fall Back to the Cascade, with the slight variation of passing the support variable to the @mixin itself. (Is that safer?)

And as a final aside, I know many folks who don't like how Sass outputs repetitive media queries in the final output, only "bubbling out" the media query as far as the bottom of the nesting. That's necessary to honor the source-order-specificity of the selector (as I understand it). I've personally never worried about it since, since I always serve assets with GZip enabled, and GZip eats repetitive text for breakfast, it doesn't change the file size that much. Not to mention browsers have no problem zooming through and applying those rules. However if you still don't like that (or I'm wrong), there is a Grunt plugin for that.

Conditional Media Query Mixins is a post from CSS-Tricks