At most universities, teaching general chemistry to fresh(wo)men is a challenge as the audience is usually composed of students of different backgrounds and interests. On one hand, the lecture is meant to bring all students to a basic level of chemistry required for future studies, on the other hand, certain concepts are discussed in much more depth than what students know from school. While it is already a balancing act to teach the content to students with little chemistry knowledge without boring those who took intensive classes at school, the University of Fribourg adds a challenge by teaching officially bilingual classes.Asking students questions is a central, although understudied and underappreciated, ingredient of teaching. Formative questioning provides many opportunities for teachers and students, e.g. to practice skills and receive feedback. Among other approaches, classroom response systems (CRSs), which run on the mobile electronic devices of students, facilitate such active engagement of students in the lecture hall. This paper presents an overview on questions for teaching with a focus on questions for CRSs and provides considerations and brief guidelines for the development of multiple-choice questions. Examples from a mid-sized analytical chemistry lecture illustrate additional challenges and different probes for potential misconceptions. Moreover, limitations of valid interpretation of students' responses are emphasized. This leads to a discussion of the value of incorporating prompts for justifications into questions.Experiences from 20 years of teaching organic chemistry at the Medical School of the University of Geneva are recollected. Emphasis is on the question how to address a large audience without particular passion for chemistry. The key lesson learned is to offer a substantial justification for every topic right at the beginning, before the basics are covered. For instance, the course opens with vancomycin resistance, achieved by changing one functional group, even one atom into another, and introductory topics are then developed literally on the structure of a beautifully complex natural product (relation of molecules, functional groups and atoms, introduction of functional groups, the octet rule, hybridization, later on also peptide chemistry, stereochemistry, etc.). Tamiflu is launched right afterwards as a possible justification why medical students should learn reaction mechanisms, long before the concerned reaction, the transformation of an acetal into a hemiacetal, is discussed. Not all classical teaching topics are compatible with such ' relevance-triggered teaching ' (nomenclature certainly not, nor halogenoalkanes, aromatic substitutions, alkynes, most of alkenes, spectroscopy, etc.). Other topics deserve more attention, like the more complex cyclic structures of sugars and steroids in the structural part and carbonyl chemistry, including catalysis, as the center of the reactivity part of the course. Difficult to measure, such ' relevance-triggered ' course restructuring, inconceivable from a classical educational point of view, has been overall surprisingly well received, although definitely not by all students.The chemistry foundation year at the University of East Anglia is a diverse cohort with a wide range of prior educational experience and confidence levels. A flexible learning program combining extensive online materials intended for asynchronous study and face to face peer instruction is provided. Study is divided into weekly topics. Students are directed to take a short introductory quiz at the beginning of the week, feedback on which allows them to tailor the extent of asynchronous learning to their own needs. All students attend a highly interactive synchronous teaching session which utilises active learning to develop their conceptual understanding. The week concludes with a reflective formative test. Measures of student activity on the online platform and audience response technology in the lecture theatre provide a quantitative picture of engagement with tailored blended learning, while semi-structured interviews provide qualitative insight into the student perception.The use of flipped lectures and Active Learning has been explored in first year lectures for several years. Learning Catalytics software has been used to facilitate Peer-2-Peer learning in the Active Learning sessions. Several lessons were learned during these sessions which were important as we moved into delivering online material much more comprehensively. Bringing interaction to the lectures that were delivered live (synchronous sessions) was important to staff. Several technical solutions for producing online videos of high quality were brought into broader use. New teaching formats including a 'radio show' have been introduced to ensure that rich interaction with the students is possible with large groups.The organization, content and rationale behind the ' Experimental Lecture General and Inorganic Chemistry ' as well as its theoretical ' Consolidation Lecture ' companion as the first contact of students in the B. Sc.  https://www.selleckchem.com/products/pembrolizumab.html  program in Chemistry and Chemical Education as well as several others, i.e. Pharmacy, Geosciences, Molecular Medicine and Physics is described. To cope with the multifaceted demands on this first semester lecture series by several faculties, the experimental lecture is attended also by students from other fields. The companion lecture that addresses the advanced needs of chemists, consolidates the content of the experimental lecture by going more into detail and extends on the theories/concepts/reactions. An integrated interplay between experiment and theory is realized in our specially equipped lecture hall.Mouse handling and restraint affect behavior, physiology, and animal welfare, yet little information is available on how various mouse restraint methods affect cardiovascular parameters. We validated the use of a smartphone-based ECG sys- tem in mice by performing simultaneous smartphone and telemetry ECG recordings in conscious, restrained mice and in anesthetized mice. We observed that mice held in standard immobilizing restraint ("scruffing") experienced severe bradycardia. Mice of both sexes and 4 different strains (BALB/cJ, C57BL/6J, DBA/2J, and FVB/nJ) were restrained by 3 handlers using 3 different restraint methods light restraint; 3-finger restraint, which creates a dorsal transverse fold of skin; and the standard immobilizing restraint, which creates a dorsal longitudinal fold of skin that results in a crease on the ventral neck. Regardless of the handler, immobilizing restraint, but not 3-finger restraint, produced severe bradycardia with irregular rhythm in all 4 strains and both sexes, with an average decrease in heart rate of 31%, or 211 bpm, and a maximal decrease of 79%, or 542 bpm.