The Maple Leafs called up leading Marlies scorer Alex Steeves but aren't expected to play him. He deserves a good look while other bottom-six players struggle, says Adam Proteau.

Poile, Nashville's first-ever general manager who retired in 2023, was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame alongside former Predators captain Shea Weber.

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.

Nearly 17 million children lack high-speed internet at home that's considered crucial to their ability to participate in remote learning during the pandemic, according to a new study.

An Alaskan high school exchange program works to promote understanding between the state's urban centers and its remote Native Villages and communities.

Enrollment snags, head-count problems, and more home schooling could end up costing districts millions in funding based on the annual tally of how many students actually show up.

The state’s supreme court ended a yearslong fight over K-12 funding earlier this summer, but in districts across the state the battles have continued and tensions remain.

Where did Georgia land in the latest CFP bracket and rankings? Here’s the College Football Playoff picture for the Bulldogs and path to championship.

Georgia football tumbled nine spots in the College Football Playoff rankings Tuesday and fell out of the 12-team bracket. What committee chair said

Nov. 12—Jarrett Gronski wasn't expecting to cry the morning before playing Wayne State. Like most athletes, the Bemidji State football team's senior running back has his pregame rituals. But that routine shook out a little differently before the Beavers' game against the Wildcats. John Gronski — Jarrett's father and a prolific running back for BSU back in the late 1980s — was officially ...

Indiana's magical season makes rare move into the College Football Playoff top five despite an embarrassingly easy schedule

From time to time, but not very often, former special-teams coordinators become NFL head coaches.

A Greenville, Miss. teacher was fired and a superintendent placed on administrative leave after a video of a student being dragged by her hair surfaced on social media.

Many schools that have recently opened their doors are already seeing COVID-19 cases among students and staff. Should that shake the confidence of other school leaders who are planning to reopen?

As Oklahoma teachers prepare for day four of their statewide walkout, here's a guide to the larger picture of teacher protests.

In Tuesday night's Republican primary in West Virginia, Robert Karnes, a West Virginia Republican state senator who lashed out at teachers during their nine-day strike, lost to pro-labor candidate Bill Hamilton.

After a couple years of clashes with teachers in the state, West Virginia Senate President Mitch Carmichael was ousted in Tuesday's Republican primary election by a teacher.

Marie Pino, who taught generations of children in her Navajo community, died at 67. She had lost one of her sons, a school basketball coach, to coronavirus-related illness just weeks before; her husband, an emergency medical coordinator and pastor, died of the illness shortly after she did.

The state's decision indicates that U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos' push on COVID-19 and private school students is having an affect.

Confusion reigns when it comes to finding and reporting data on school-related coronavirus infections. That's a problem for school leaders weighing shutdowns.

Hannah Hidalgo scored 11 of her 28 points in the first 7-plus minutes and No. 6 Notre Dame led by double figures for more than 35 minutes Sunday night as the Fighting Irish beat Purdue 102-58 for their 10th consecutive win over the Boilermakers. Notre Dame (2-0) has a 15-14 lead in its all-time series with Purdue. Olivia Miles added 17 points and Sonia Citron scored 14.

Nov. 10—STORRS — Paige Bueckers headed to the bench for her first break of the game just 35 seconds before halftime Sunday at sold-out Gampel Pavilion. Judging by the way the UConn star almost effortlessly dominated play, Bueckers still looked fairly fresh. She already had piled up 19 points. Then again, South Florida certainly must have been tired of watching Bueckers score in a variety of ...

South Carolina a unanimous No. in women's AP Top 25 after 2 wins to open repeat bid; Stanford, Oregon crack rankings.

Notre Dame sophomore guard Hannah Hidalgo is on the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association (WBCA) Wade Watch List. She's among 15 players being watched as a potential winner of the oldest, most prestigious player of the year award. She was a Region I finalist for…

Lady Vols basketball relied on its best 3-point shooting night of the season to close out a win over Middle Tennessee State on Tuesday

Early in the second half, Ohio State freshman Jaloni Cambridge went down with an apparent lower-back injury.

JuJu Watkins had 21 points, nine assists and six steals to help No. 3 Southern California trounce Cal State Northridge 124-39 on Tuesday night. The Trojans (3-0) had six players in double figures, including Kiki Iriafen with 15 points and Kayleigh Heckel with 14 points off the bench. All 13 Trojans who played scored.

Wen Grace Chen
Nov 9, 2022; 42:8498-8507
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Holly Oakley
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Neurobiology of Disease

Donna M. Wilcock
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Pietro Mazzoni
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Neurobiology of Disease

As evidence mounts that the cardiac-sympathetic nervous system reacts to challenging cognitive settings, we ask if these responses are epiphenomenal companions or if there is evidence suggesting a more intertwined role of this system with cognitive function. Healthy male and female human participants performed an approach-avoidance paradigm, trading off monetary reward for painful electric shock, while we recorded simultaneous electroencephalographic and cardiac-sympathetic signals. Participants were reward sensitive but also experienced approach-avoidance "conflict" when the subjective appeal of the reward was near equivalent to the revulsion of the cost. Drift-diffusion model parameters suggested that participants managed conflict in part by integrating larger volumes of evidence into choices (wider decision boundaries). Late alpha-band (neural) dynamics were consistent with widening decision boundaries serving to combat reward sensitivity and spread attention more fairly to all dimensions of available information. Independently, wider boundaries were also associated with cardiac "contractility" (an index of sympathetically mediated positive inotropy). We also saw evidence of conflict-specific "collaboration" between the neural and cardiac-sympathetic signals. In states of high conflict, the alignment (i.e., product) of alpha dynamics and contractility were associated with a further widening of the boundary, independent of either signal's singular association. Cross-trial coherence analyses provided additional evidence that the autonomic systems controlling cardiac-sympathetics might influence the assessment of information streams during conflict by disrupting or overriding reward processing. We conclude that cardiac-sympathetic control might play a critical role, in collaboration with cognitive processes, during the approach-avoidance conflict in humans.

Emerging research in nonhuman animals implicates cerebellar projections to the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in appetitive behaviors, but these circuits have not been characterized in humans. Here, we mapped cerebello-VTA white matter connectivity in a cohort of men and women using probabilistic tractography on diffusion imaging data from the Human Connectome Project. We uncovered the topographical organization of these connections by separately tracking from parcels of cerebellar lobule VI, crus I/II, vermis, paravermis, and cerebrocerebellum. Results revealed that connections between the cerebellum and VTA predominantly originate in the right cerebellar hemisphere, interposed nucleus, and paravermal cortex and terminate mostly ipsilaterally. Paravermal crus I sends the most connections to the VTA compared with other lobules. We discovered a mediolateral gradient of connectivity, such that the medial cerebellum has the highest connectivity with the VTA. Individual differences in microstructure were associated with measures of negative affect and social functioning. By splitting the tracts into quarters, we found that the socioaffective effects were driven by the third quarter of the tract, corresponding to the point at which the fibers leave the deep nuclei. Taken together, we produced detailed maps of cerebello-VTA structural connectivity for the first time in humans and established their relevance for trait differences in socioaffective regulation.

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.

We recently demonstrated that transient attenuation of Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR4) in dorsal root ganglion (DRG) neurons, can both prevent and reverse pain associated with chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy (CIPN), a severe side effect of cancer chemotherapy, for which treatment options are limited. Given the reduced efficacy of opioid analgesics to treat neuropathic, compared with inflammatory pain, the cross talk between nociceptor TLR4 and mu-opioid receptors (MORs), and that MOR and TLR4 agonists induce hyperalgesic priming (priming), which also occurs in CIPN, we determined, using male rats, whether (1) antisense knockdown of nociceptor MOR attenuates CIPN, (2) and attenuates the priming associated with CIPN, and (3) CIPN also produces opioid-induced hyperalgesia (OIH). We found that intrathecal MOR antisense prevents and reverses hyperalgesia induced by oxaliplatin and paclitaxel, two common clinical chemotherapy agents. Oxaliplatin-induced priming was also markedly attenuated by MOR antisense. Additionally, intradermal morphine, at a dose that does not affect nociceptive threshold in controls, exacerbates mechanical hyperalgesia (OIH) in rats with CIPN, suggesting the presence of OIH. This OIH associated with CIPN is inhibited by interventions that reverse Type II priming [the combination of an inhibitor of Src and mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK)], an MOR antagonist, as well as a TLR4 antagonist. Our findings support a role of nociceptor MOR in oxaliplatin-induced pain and priming. We propose that priming and OIH are central to the symptom burden in CIPN, contributing to its chronicity and the limited efficacy of opioid analgesics to treat neuropathic pain.

We used virus-mediated anterograde and retrograde tracing, optogenetic modulation, immunostaining, in situ hybridization, and patch-clamp recordings in acute brain slices to study the release mechanism and μ-opioid modulation of the dual glutamatergic/GABAergic inputs from the ventral tegmental area and supramammillary nucleus to the granule cells of the dorsal hippocampus of male and female mice. In keeping with previous reports showing that the two transmitters are released by separate active zones within the same terminals, we found that the short-term plasticity and pharmacological modulation of the glutamatergic and GABAergic currents are indistinguishable. We further found that glutamate and GABA release at these synapses are both virtually completely mediated by N- and P/Q-type calcium channels. We then investigated μ-opioid modulation of these synapses and found that activation of μ-opioid receptors (MORs) strongly inhibits the glutamate and GABA release, mostly through inhibition of presynaptic N-type channels. However, the modulation by MORs of these dual synapses is complex, as it likely includes also a disinhibition due to downmodulation of local GABAergic interneurons which make direct axo-axonic contacts with the dual glutamatergic/GABAergic terminals. We discuss how this opioid modulation may enhance LTP at the perforant path inputs, potentially contributing to reinforce memories of drug-associated contexts.

Neural decoding is a tool for understanding how activities from a population of neurons inside the brain relate to the outside world and for engineering applications such as brain–machine interfaces. However, neural decoding studies mainly focused on different decoding algorithms rather than different neuron types which could use different coding strategies. In this study, we used two-photon calcium imaging to assess three auditory spatial decoders (space map, opponent channel, and population pattern) in excitatory and inhibitory neurons in the dorsal inferior colliculus of male and female mice. Our findings revealed a clustering of excitatory neurons that prefer similar interaural level difference (ILD), the primary spatial cues in mice, while inhibitory neurons showed random local ILD organization. We found that inhibitory neurons displayed lower decoding variability under the opponent channel decoder, while excitatory neurons achieved higher decoding accuracy under the space map and population pattern decoders. Further analysis revealed that the inhibitory neurons’ preference for ILD off the midline and the excitatory neurons’ heterogeneous ILD tuning account for their decoding differences. Additionally, we discovered a sharper ILD tuning in the inhibitory neurons. Our computational model, linking this to increased presynaptic inhibitory inputs, was corroborated using monaural and binaural stimuli. Overall, this study provides experimental and computational insight into how excitatory and inhibitory neurons uniquely contribute to the coding of sound locations.