Bringing cell biology into classroom: tips to culture and observe skeletal muscle cells in high school and college.

Watching living cells through a microscope is much more exciting than seeing pictures of cells in high school and college textbooks. However, bringing cell cultures into the classroom is challenging for biology teachers since culturing cells requires sophisticated and expensive instruments such as a CO2 incubator and an inverted phase-contrast microscope. Here, we describe easy and affordable methods to culture and observe skeletal muscle cells using the L-15 culture medium, tissue culture flask, standard dry incubator, standard upright microscope, and modified Smartphone microscope. Watching natural living cells in a "Do-It-Yourself (DIY)" way may inspire more students' interest in cell biology.

Study for the pentaquark potential in SU(3) lattice QCD.

We perform the first study of the static pentaquark (5Q) potential V(5Q) in SU(3) quenched lattice QCD with 16(3) x 32 and beta = 6.0. From the 5Q Wilson loop, V(5Q) is calculated in a gauge-invariant manner, with the smearing method to enhance the ground-state component. V(5Q) is well described by the OGE-plus-multi-Y ansatz: a sum of the one-gluon-exchange (OGE) Coulomb term and the multi-Y-type linear term proportional to the minimal total length of the flux tube linking the five quarks. Comparing with QQ and3Q potentials, we find a universality of the string tension, sigma(QQ) approximately sigma(3Q) approximately sigma(5Q), and the OGE result for Coulomb coefficients.