Districts are reconfiguring services, offering hazard pay, and partnering with food banks to keep up with a growing, unprecedented demand for food services during the school shutdown.

Pandemic-inflicted budget cuts have cost thousands of educators their jobs. Here’s how that’s playing out in five districts around the country.

This Quality Counts 2020 Highlights Report captures all the data you need to assess your state's performance on key educational outcomes.

In this third installment on the growth in dual-language learning, one expert says broad access to programs is important, but that students need an early start to reap the benefits.

In the aftermath of this spring's teacher protests, more educators are running for state office—and the National Education Association is seizing on the political moment.

A union lobbyist who worked just one day as a substitute teacher is entitled to a pension worth potentially tens of thousands of dollars annually, the Illinois supreme court has ruled.

The state's budget bill, which Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner signed into law this week, caps annual raises for end-of-career-teachers, lowering the pension they can receive.

This Quality Counts 2019 Highlights Report captures all the data you need to assess your state's performance on key educational outcomes.

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.

This Quality Counts 2020 Highlights Report captures all the data you need to assess your state's performance on key educational outcomes.

If an opponent isn't contending for an ACC or national championship, Notre Dame is likely to run it out of the gym. That's exactly what happened during the Irish's first road game of the season against Purdue. Much like with the football team less than two months earlier,…

Dazzling first with a relentless hawking defense that helped force 22 turnovers, then adding an almost frantic-paced offensive assault, the 2-0 No. 6-ranked Irish overwhelmed Purdue (1-1), 102-58, at Mackey Arena in West Lafayette, Ind. Dynamo guard Hannah Hidalgo was slapping, diving and picking pockets all night, making life miserable for any Boilermaker stuck bringing the ball up the floor. ► Snap Counts: Here's who played for Notre Dame football against Florida St.

Wisconsin's Ronnie Porter established a new scoring high and Serah Williams and Carter McCray posted double-doubles in win over Georgetown Sunday.

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

The Gamecocks earned a hard-fought six-point win over Michigan in Las Vegas to open the season and beat then-No. 9 North Carolina State on Sunday by 14. The two victories made the defending champions a unanimous choice from the 31-member national media panel. In the preseason poll, No. 2 UConn got two first-place votes and No. 3 USC one.

UConn women’s basketball freshman Sarah Strong earned the first Big East Freshman of the Week honors of her career on Monday after a pair of impressive performances in the Huskies’ Week 1 wins. Strong was the No. 1 recruit in the Class of 2024 and lived up to her elite billing with a game-high 17 points in her college debut against Boston University on Thursday. She also led the team with six ...

Freshman had a season-high 13 points off bench while contributing to Spartans' win over Eastern Michigan.

Onward State published a story this week that contained on-the-record comments from former Marquette players about Carolyn Kieger's coaching style.

Tennessee Lady Vols basketball will open the 2025-26 season with a neutral-site matchup against NC State in Greensboro at First Horizon Coliseum

LSU women's basketball bucked a bit of a slow start to blowout Charleston Southern Tuesday morning.

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

Nov. 12—The Gonzaga women's basketball team has much to learn after a challenging loss at Stanford on Sunday. Losses have a way of exposing a team's shortcomings. And there is much to learn from the worst loss (89-58) in coach Lisa Fortier's 11 seasons. Stanford, unranked in the preseason poll for the first time since 1999-2000, is unranked no more. The Cardinal (3-0) entered at No. 24 in the ...

Wen Grace Chen
Nov 9, 2022; 42:8498-8507
Symposium and Mini-Symposium

Holly Oakley
Oct 4, 2006; 26:10129-10140
Neurobiology of Disease

Marloes J. A. G. Henckens
Aug 12, 2009; 29:10111-10119
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Rafael G. Almeida
Oct 18, 2017; 37:10023-10034
Viewpoints

Robbert Havekes
Dec 12, 2012; 32:18137-18149
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Sukhbinder Kumar
Jun 30, 2021; 41:5762-5770
Neurobiology of Disease

Bruce S. McEwen
Jan 2, 2020; 40:12-21
Viewpoints

William W. Seeley
Dec 11, 2019; 39:9878-9882
Progressions

Randy L. Buckner
Aug 24, 2005; 25:7709-7717
Neurobiology of Disease

Holly Oakley
Oct 4, 2006; 26:10129-10140
Neurobiology of Disease

Recent visual experience heavily influences our visual perception, but how neuronal activity is reshaped to alter and improve perceptual discrimination remains unknown. We recorded from populations of neurons in visual cortical area V4 while two male rhesus macaque monkeys performed a natural image change detection task under different experience conditions. We found that maximizing the recent experience with a particular image led to an improvement in the ability to detect a change in that image. This improvement was associated with decreased neural responses to the image, consistent with neuronal changes previously seen in studies of adaptation and expectation. We found that the magnitude of behavioral improvement was correlated with the magnitude of response suppression. Furthermore, this suppression of activity led to an increase in signal separation, providing evidence that a reduction in activity can improve stimulus encoding. Within populations of neurons, greater recent experience was associated with decreased trial-to-trial shared variability, indicating that a reduction in variability is a key means by which experience influences perception. Taken together, the results of our study contribute to an understanding of how recent visual experience can shape our perception and behavior through modulating activity patterns in the mid-level visual cortex.

Vertebrate nervous systems use the axon initial segment (AIS) to initiate action potentials and maintain neuronal polarity. The microtubule-associated protein tripartite motif containing 46 (TRIM46) was reported to regulate axon specification, AIS assembly, and neuronal polarity through the bundling, or fasciculation, of microtubules in the proximal axon. However, these claims are based on TRIM46 knockdown in cultured neurons. To investigate TRIM46 function in vivo, we examined male and female TRIM46 knock-out mice. Contrary to previous reports, we find that TRIM46 is dispensable for axon specification and AIS formation. TRIM46 knock-out mice are viable, have normal behavior, and have normal brain structure. Thus, TRIM46 is not required for AIS formation, axon specification, or nervous system function. However, we confirm that TRIM46 is required for microtubule fasciculation. We also show TRIM46 enrichment in the first ~100 μm of axon occurs independently of ankyrinG (AnkG) in vivo, although AnkG is required to restrict TRIM46 only to the AIS. Our results highlight the need for further investigation of the mechanisms by which the AIS and microtubules interact to shape neuronal structure and function.

In demanding listening situations, a listener's motivational state may affect their cognitive investment. Here, we aim to delineate how domain-specific sensory processing, domain-general neural alpha power, and pupil size as a proxy for cognitive investment encode influences of motivational state under demanding listening. Participants (male and female) performed an auditory gap-detection task while the pupil size and the magnetoencephalogram were simultaneously recorded. Task demand and a listener's motivational state were orthogonally manipulated through changes in gap duration and monetary-reward prospect, respectively. Whereas task difficulty impaired performance, reward prospect enhanced it. The pupil size reliably indicated the modulatory impact of an individual's motivational state. At the neural level, the motivational state did not affect auditory sensory processing directly but impacted attentional postprocessing of an auditory event as reflected in the late evoked-response field and alpha-power change. Both pregap pupil dilation and higher parietal alpha power predicted better performance at the single-trial level. The current data support a framework wherein the motivational state acts as an attentional top–down neural means of postprocessing the auditory input in challenging listening situations.

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.

Plasticity in the subcortical motor basal ganglia–thalamo–cerebellar network plays a key role in the acquisition and control of long-term memory for new procedural skills, from the formation of population trajectories controlling trained motor skills in the striatum to the adaptation of sensorimotor maps in the cerebellum. However, recent findings demonstrate the involvement of a wider cortical and subcortical brain network in the consolidation and control of well-trained actions, including a brain region traditionally associated with declarative memory—the hippocampus. Here, we probe which role these subcortical areas play in skilled motor sequence control, from sequence feature selection during planning to their integration during sequence execution. An fMRI dataset (N = 24; 14 females) collected after participants learnt to produce four finger press sequences entirely from memory with high movement and timing accuracy over several days was examined for both changes in BOLD activity and their informational content in subcortical regions of interest. Although there was a widespread activity increase in effector-related striatal, thalamic, and cerebellar regions, in particular during sequence execution, the associated activity did not contain information on the motor sequence identity. In contrast, hippocampal activity increased during planning and predicted the order of the upcoming sequence of movements. Our findings suggest that the hippocampus preorders movements for skilled action sequences, thus contributing to the higher-order control of skilled movements that require flexible retrieval. These findings challenge the traditional taxonomy of episodic and procedural memory and carry implications for the rehabilitation of individuals with neurodegenerative disorders.

Words offer a unique opportunity to separate the processing mechanisms of object subcomponents from those of the whole object, because the phonological or semantic information provided by the word subcomponents (i.e., sublexical information) can conflict with that provided by the whole word (i.e., lexical information). Previous studies have revealed some of the specific brain regions and temporal information involved in sublexical information processing. However, a comprehensive spatiotemporal neural network for sublexical processing remains to be fully elucidated due to the low temporal or spatial resolutions of previous neuroimaging studies. In this study, we recorded stereoelectroencephalography signals with high spatial and temporal resolutions from a large sample of 39 epilepsy patients (both sexes) during a Chinese character oral reading task. We explored the activated brain regions and their connectivity related to three sublexical effects: phonological regularity (whether the whole character's pronunciation aligns with its phonetic radical), phonological consistency (whether characters with the same phonetic radical share the same pronunciation), and semantic transparency (whether the whole character's meaning aligns with its semantic radical). The results revealed that sublexical effects existed in the inferior frontal gyrus, precentral and postcentral gyri, temporal lobe, and middle occipital gyrus. Additionally, connectivity from the middle occipital gyrus to the postcentral gyrus and from postcentral gyrus to the fusiform gyrus was associated with the sublexical effects. These findings provide valuable insights into the spatiotemporal dynamics of sublexical processing and object recognition in the brain.

The work of Diné artist DY Begay, now on view at the National Museum of the American Indian, blends tradition and modernity

FAO and the World Health Organization (WHO) will continue to work closely on nutrition, food safety and antimicrobial resistance issues, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva and WHO Director Margaret [...]

Representatives of all countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have gathered here this week to agree on the actions needed to definitively eradicate hunger in the region before 2025. [...]

Prince Laurent of Belgium was today appointed FAO Special Ambassador for Forests and the Environment.

The announcement was made by FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva at the Organization’s Committee on [...]

Santiago, Chile- The declaration of the XXI Specialized Meeting on Family Farming of MERCOSUR (REAF, in Spanish) held last week in Argentina, acknowledged the advances promoted by FAO’s Director General, [...]

The Thomson Reuters Foundation, the corporate charity of the world’s biggest news and information providers, is teaming up with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to improve [...]

Better management of the world's ocean resources is crucial to ensuring food global security, [...]