Designers and evaluators of immersive virtual reality systems have many ideas concerning how virtual reality can facilitate learning. However, we have little information concerning which of virtual reality's features provide the most leverage for enhancing understanding or how to customize those affordances for different learning environments. In part, this reflects the truly complex nature of learning. Features of a learning environment do not act in isolation; other factors such as the concepts or skills to be learned, individual characteristics, the learning experience, and the interaction experience all play a role in shaping the learning process and its outcomes. Through Project Science Space, we have been trying to identify, use, and evaluate immersive virtual reality's affordances as a means to facilitate the mastery of complex, abstract concepts. In doing so, we are beginning to understand the interplay between virtual reality's features and other important factors in shaping the learning process and learning outcomes for this type of material. In this paper, we present a general model that describes how we think these factors work together and discuss some of the lessons we are learning about virtual reality's affordances in the context of this model for complex conceptual learning.

Overall, the CDT may be as effective as the MMSE or CASI as a first-level dementia screen for clinical use in multiethnic, multilingual samples of older adults. Its brevity (1-5 minutes), minimal language requirements, high acceptability, and lack of dependence on specialized testing materials are well adapted for screening of non-English-speaking elderly persons in settings where bilingual interpreters are not readily available and screening time is at a premium.

at Santa Barbara. His B.S. degree is from Purdue, his M.S. degree is from the University of Wyoming, and his Ph.D. is from the University of Otago (New Zealand). He has conducted research on various aspects of clastic diagenesis for more than 35 years. His current research is on fault diagenesis, pressure solution, and geochemical tools for interpreting diagenetic processes.

mTOR inhibitors are used clinically to treat renal cancer but are not curative. Here we show that autophagy is a resistance mechanism of human renal cell carcinoma (RCC) cell lines to mTOR inhibitors. RCC cell lines have high basal autophagy that is required for survival to mTOR inhibition. In RCC4 cells, inhibition of mTOR with CCI-779 stimulates autophagy and eliminates RIP kinases (RIPKs) and this is blocked by autophagy inhibition, which induces RIPK- and ROS-dependent necroptosis in vitro and suppresses xenograft growth. Autophagy of mitochondria is required for cell survival since mTOR inhibition turns off Nrf2 antioxidant defense. Thus, coordinate mTOR and autophagy inhibition leads to an imbalance between ROS production and defense, causing necroptosis that may enhance cancer treatment efficacy.