As the bizarre becomes ordinary, don't forget what's at stake for America's teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic, writes Justin Minkel.

A $12.2 million dollar grant from the state Department of Public Instruction will go to a program based at North Carolina State University to provide additional training literacy training to teachers in 16 high-needs districts across the state.

Building science lessons around phenomena that students know equally and can see in their own lives is making the subject more relevant and interesting.

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is not famous for pressuring states into desired outcomes, but did put at least two states' Title I funding on "high-risk" status last year.

A California organization is tasked with giving out $9.4 million in grants to local programs across the state to solve shortages.

All of Hawaii's public schools were closed down last week in anticipation of a powerful hurricane.

Building science lessons around phenomena that students know equally and can see in their own lives is making the subject more relevant and interesting.

Georgia wants to allow districts to use a series of "formative assessments" instead of one big test at the end of the year.

Nephron Pharmaceuticals, a drug manufacturing company in West Columbia, S.C., recently hired 650 current and retired teachers through a new program designed to provide educators with additional income.

A bill prohibiting anti-Semitism in Florida's public schools and universities is going to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The state's board voted not to open the Common Core to revision, but its commissioner still plans to review them informally, with an eye to future changes.

It's pretty obvious by now that many Democrats are growing increasingly uncomfortable supporting charter schools. But New Hampshire lawmakers have taken the unusual step of rejecting federal charter school grant money.

Teachers across the state are outraged over a new rule that requires 15 hours of workforce-related professional development.

The school district, which serves about 11,200 students, postponed opening because of the protests following the death of Michael Brown, the 18-year-old black teenager who was shot by a white police officer.

Elvis Merzlikins is expected to start for the Blue Jackets, who are mired in a five-game losing streak and have never beaten the Kraken in regulation.

The New Jersey Devils will face former teammates Tomas Nosek, Jesper Boqvist, AJ Greer, and Dmitry Kulikov on Tuesday night in their game against the Florida Panthers.

Timo Meier scored the go-ahead goal late in the second period, Jacob Markstrom made 33 saves and the New Jersey Devils snapped Florida’s seven-game winning streak by beating the Panthers 4-1 on Tuesday night.

The Calgary Flames' fifth game in eight nights and three time zones was a tough one they need to learn from

It was Louisville women's basketball vs UT Martin at the Kathleen and Tom Elam Center. See score updates and highlights from the road clash.

Donna M. Wilcock
May 1, 2003; 23:3745-3751
Development Plasticity Repair

When faced with danger, human beings respond with a repertoire of defensive behaviors, including freezing and active avoidance. Previous research has revealed a pattern of physiological responses, characterized by heart rate bradycardia, reduced visual exploration, and heightened sympathetic arousal in reaction to avoidable threats, suggesting a state of attentive immobility in humans. However, the electrocortical underpinnings of these behaviors remain largely unexplored. To investigate the visuocortical components of attentive immobility, we recorded parieto-occipital alpha activity, along with eye movements and autonomic responses, while participants awaited either an avoidable, inevitable, or no threat. To test the robustness and generalizability of our findings, we collected data from a total of 101 participants (76 females, 25 males) at two laboratories. Across sites, we observed an enhanced suppression of parieto-occipital alpha activity during avoidable threats, in contrast to inevitable or no threat trials, particularly toward the end of the trial that prompted avoidance responses. This response pattern coincided with heart rate bradycardia, centralization of gaze, and increased sympathetic arousal. Furthermore, our findings expand on previous research by revealing that the amount of alpha suppression, along with centralization of gaze, and heart rate changes predict the speed of motor responses. Collectively, these findings indicate that when individuals encounter avoidable threats, they enter a state of attentive immobility, which enhances perceptual processing and facilitates action preparation. This state appears to reflect freezing-like behavior in humans.

Large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have associated intronic variants in PDE4B, encoding cAMP-specific phosphodiesterase-4B (PDE4B), with increased risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as schizophrenia and substance use disorders that are often comorbid with it. However, the pathophysiological mechanisms of genetic risk involving PDE4B are poorly understood. To examine the effects of PDE4B variation on phenotypes with translational relevance to psychiatric disorders, we focused on PDE4B missense variant M220T, which is present in the human genome as rare coding variant rs775201287. When expressed in HEK-293 cells, PDE4B1-M220T exhibited an attenuated response to a forskolin-elicited increase in the intracellular cAMP concentration. In behavioral tests, homozygous Pde4b^M220T male mice with a C57BL/6JJcl background exhibited increased reactivity to novel environments, startle hyperreactivity, prepulse inhibition deficits, altered cued fear conditioning, and enhanced spatial memory, accompanied by an increase in cAMP signaling pathway-regulated expression of BDNF in the hippocampus. In response to a traumatic event (10 tone–shock pairings), neuronal activity was decreased in the cortex but enhanced in the amygdala and hippocampus of Pde4b^M220T mice. At 24 h post-trauma, Pde4b^M220T mice exhibited increased startle hyperreactivity and decreased plasma corticosterone levels, similar to phenotypes exhibited by PTSD patients. Trauma-exposed Pde4b^M220T mice also exhibited a slower decay in freezing at 15 and 30 d post-trauma, demonstrating enhanced persistence of traumatic memories, similar to that exhibited by PTSD patients. These findings provide substantive mouse model evidence linking PDE4B variation to PTSD-relevant phenotypes and thus highlight how genetic variation of PDE4B may contribute to PTSD risk.

Odor information arrives first in the main olfactory bulb and is then broadcasted to the olfactory cortices and striatum. Downstream regions have unique cellular and connectivity architectures that may generate different coding patterns to the same odors. To reveal region-specific response features, tuning and decoding of single-unit populations, we recorded responses to the same odors under the same conditions across regions, namely, the main olfactory bulb (MOB), the anterior olfactory nucleus (AON), the anterior piriform cortex (aPC), and the olfactory tubercle of the ventral striatum (OT), of awake male mice. We focused on chemically closely related aldehydes that still create distinct percepts. The MOB had the highest decoding accuracy for aldehydes and was the only region encoding chemical similarity. The MOB had the highest fraction of inhibited responses and narrowly tuned odor-excited responses in terms of timing and odor selectivity. Downstream, the interconnected AON and aPC differed in their response patterns to the same stimuli. While odor-excited responses dominated the AON, the aPC had a comparably high fraction of odor-inhibited responses. Both cortices share a main output target that is the MOB. This prompted us to test if the two regions convey also different net outputs. Aldehydes activated AON terminals in the MOB as a bulk signal but inhibited those from the aPC. The differential cortical projection responses generalized to complex odors. In summary, olfactory regions reveal specialized features in their encoding with AON and aPC differing in their local computations, thereby generating inverse net centrifugal and intercortical outputs.

A new study from Smithsonian scientists analyzes ant and fungus species, and uncovers the origins of their close partnership

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Hybrid event (FAO headquarters and Zoom)

Wednesday, 2 November 2022 from 9:30 to 20:00 hours (CET) – with reception from [...]