The Center for Cancer Research, NCI, will hold a national symposium titled, "Frontiers in Basic Immunology," on Sept. 28-29 in Masur Auditorium, Bldg. 10. The meeting will host leaders in the field of immunology and include discussion and debate on current understanding of basic immunological mechanisms. Sessions will include "Signaling and Effector Cell Function," "Lymphoid Development and Differentiation" and "Cellular and Innate Immunity." Speakers include Drs. Harinder Singh (U Chicago/Howard Hughes Inst.), Juan Zuniga-Pflucker (U Toronto), Laurie Glimcher (Harvard), Al Singer (NCI), Remy Bosselut (NCI), Andre Nussenzweig (NCI), Craig Thompson (Penn), Shankar Ghosh (Yale), Jon Ashwell (NCI), Larry Samelson (NCI), Scott Durum (NCI), Tom Waldmann (NCI), Jeff Bluestone (UCSF), Alberto Mantovani (U of Milan), Chris Biron (Brown), Joost Oppenheim (NCI), Giorgio Trinchieri (NIAID) and Mary Carrington (SAIC-Frederick, NCI). There is no fee and registration can be done online at http://web.ncifcrf.gov/events/basicimmunology/default.asp. For more information, contact Karen Kochersberger at kkochersberger@ncifcrf.gov or (301) 228-4027.

Registration for the 2006-2007 "Introduction to the Principles and Practice of Clinical Research," began on Aug. 1. The course will run from Oct. 16 through Feb. 20, 2007. The deadline for registering is Oct. 6. Classes will be held on campus on Monday and Tuesday evenings from 5 to 6:30. There is no charge for the course but purchase of a textbook is suggested. A certificate will be awarded upon successful completion of the course, including a final exam. For more information or to register, visit http://www.cc.nih.gov/researchers/training/ippcr.shtml or call (301) 496-9425.

The Principles of Clinical Pharmacology course, sponsored by the Clinical Center, will begin in Lipsett Amphitheater, Bldg. 10 on Sept. 7. The course will be held Thursday evenings from 6:30 to approximately 7:45 and will run through Apr. 26, 2007.

The course covers topics such as pharmacokinetics, drug metabolism and transport, assessment of drug effects, drug therapy in special populations and drug discovery and development. An outstanding faculty has been assembled to present the lectures. The faculty has also prepared a textbook, Principles of Clinical Pharmacology, Second Edition, which will be available in the Foundation for Advanced Education in the Sciences, Inc. bookstore located in Bldg. 10. The textbook is also available from Amazon.com.

This is the ninth year that the course is being offered. Registration is open to all interested persons free of charge. Certificates will be awarded at the end of the course to students who attend at least 75 percent of the lectures. More information about the course, including online registration, is available at http://www.cc.nih.gov/researchers/training/principles.shtml or by calling (301) 435-6618.

Laura Shubert is the new director of the NIH Fitness Centers, both in Bldg. 31 and in the Rockledge facility. A native of Vermont, she recently earned a degree in kinesiology from the University of Maryland. Shubert hopes to use her knowledge and enthusiasm to elicit a sense of overall good health and wellness among the NIH community.

Music lovers can take a guided tour of the Bela Bartók string quartets with Dr. Joel Berman and members of the Beethoven/Bartók Cycle Quartet, well-known for similar performance-lectures featuring Beethoven string quartets. The series is being offered by the FAES Graduate School (course #GENL 158) on Mondays, beginning Sept. 11 from 7 to 9 p.m. For more information call Berman at (301) 946-2311 or email BBCQuartet@aol.com. For registration information, call (301) 496-7976 or visit www.faes.org. Register by mail through Aug. 18, or in person Aug. 30-Sept. 1.

Peter Kellman of NHLBI demonstrates a magnetic field using an array of compasses.	Christine Yao performs an experiment in a class on chemical structure.

Adventure in Science, a nonprofit science education program for children, is planning its 14th year at NIH. The program, which meets on Saturday mornings October through March in Bldg. 10, is designed to show 8-11 year-olds the fun of science using hands-on activities, from building (and launching) model rockets to dissecting frogs. The teachers are mostly volunteers from NIH, from postdoc to institute director. If you are interested in volunteering to teach, contact Peter Kellman, (301) 496-2513 (peter.kellman@nih.hhs.gov) or Ed Max, (301) 827-1806 (edward.max@fda.hhs.gov). To enroll a child, request forms from the 4H office at Montgomery County Cooperative Extension, (301) 590-9638.

What do Lance Armstrong, Dolly the Sheep and NASA astronauts have in common? They have all appeared on NIH VideoCast.

Since its inception almost 10 years ago with the first video streaming of a mitochondrial interest group meeting, the Center for Information Technology's VideoCast service has reached a milestone and now has more than 3,000 events available in its archive. The largest single event was the 2005 Presidential address on pandemic flu with 7,000 simultaneous VideoCast viewers.

VideoCasting provides viewers with access to world-renowned scientists, informational sessions on new discoveries and administrative best practices right from their desktop computer, MP3 or video player.

VideoCast is accessible to a wide audience both internal and external to NIH. Thirty-one percent of the viewership is international, ranging from Sri Lanka to Brazil. The service provides captioning for Section 508 compliance.

In partnership with the National Library of Medicine, CIT is adding improved cataloging and information about its events, as well as encoding events in high quality MPEG2 (video) format. With the use of new search/voice recognition technology, researchers will soon be able to scan the video archives for the occurrence of scientific terms and locate those within specific segments of the archive.

For more information, and to view the archives, visit http://videocast.nih.gov.

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