Rockies outfielder David Dahl spent last September signing his home runs with his bad dude sashay. He did it then, he'll do it again in 2019.

On this opening week of Spring Training, all 30 Major League teams have one thing in common: optimism. Here's an optimism cheat sheet for each of them.

The next five weeks will see lots of shuffling on Major League rosters. Here are the most intriguing positional battles on each of the 30 MLB clubs.

Rockies top prospect Brendan Rodgers realizes he has to keep his spirits light even though his assignment is heavy.

Rockies manager Bud Black said the team prefers that longtime center fielder Charlie Blackmon move to right field, rather than left.

Ryan McMahon and the Rockies hope the struggles of 2018 lead to an immediate payoff. McMahon is a prime competitor for regular starts at second base, and those will come his way if he realizes potential for power and run production.

The baseball field is Rockies third baseman Nolan Arenado's refuge from contract talks. But Tuesday's breaking news -- Manny Machado's 10-year, $300 million contract with the Padres -- made its way onto the field.

Most fans still have a difficult time picturing Jose Bautista wearing anything besides a Blue Jays uniform. In the future, few will be able to name the three organizations Bautista played for in 2018. Some athletes will always be remembered for wearing one uniform in one city, and Bautista is one of those.

The countdown to pitchers and catchers reporting is down to single digits for all 30 MLB clubs, but as exciting as it is to see the return of Major League stars, it's also a time to dream about the next wave of baseball talent.

Spring Training is imminent, Opening Day is within sight and the big league season isn't complete for fans without a subscription to MLB.TV. The most comprehensive streaming service in professional sports is now available for the 2019 season.

The Blue Jays will start determining who their catcher of the future will be when Danny Jansen and Reese McGuire battle it out behind the plate this spring.

Considering the players that get the big bucks often get most of the attention when they are signed and drafted, let's take some time to look at the other end of the spectrum. Here are the biggest steals on the Top 100 Prospects list.

The Blue Jays are less than one week away from the start of Spring Training. Here's a brief rundown of everything fans need to know before the Grapefruit League season officially begins.

What unheralded prospect could break out in 2019? Beat reporter Gregor Chisholm answers that and more in this edition of the Inbox.

The Blue Jays spent the past two years clinging to the past. Now, they're embracing the future.

The start of Spring Training is almost here and it's time for the annual tradition of predicting the Blue Jays' 25-man roster. MLB.com will revisit these projections midway through camp, and then again at the end of Spring Training to see how close we came.

All 30 Major League teams will wear special "MLB 150" patches on their uniforms for the entire 2019 season in honor of the 150th anniversary of the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first openly all-salaried professional baseball team.

Fans and analysts spend the entire offseason speculating where the top free agents could go, but sometimes an under-the-radar pickup can end up making a world of difference. As positional competitions begin to heat up at Spring Training camps this month, MLB.com's beat writers were asked to identify one potentially overlooked acquisition for each of the 30 clubs. Here's who they came up with.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr. hasn't even reported for duty yet and already he has become the main talking point at Blue Jays Spring Training. General manager Ross Atkins was bombarded with questions about MLB Pipeline's top prospect during his first media availability of the spring on Thursday.

Charlie Montoyo is about to embark on the first spring of his managerial career, and based on the number of decisions he has to make, it's going to be a challenging six weeks.

The Blue Jays were barely one hour into the official start of Spring Training when general manager Ross Atkins threw the first curveball of the year. The news wasn't so much who made the list, but rather who did not. Despite an impressive 2018 rookie season, lefty Ryan Borucki apparently hasn't been guaranteed anything quite yet.

The Blue Jays have followed the lead of several other teams around Major League Baseball by using a Rapsodo machine to analyze spin-rate data. A Rapsodo camer is used to understand how much movement, velocity and spin pitchers are getting on every toss.

Blue Jays manager Charlie Montoyo was so impressed with Aaron Sanchez's first bullpen session of the spring that it would have been almost impossible to wipe the smile off his face afterwards.

The Blue Jays officially added another veteran to their bullpen Saturday morning by signing right-hander John Axford to a Minor League deal with an invitation to Spring Training. Axford hasn't received any guarantees with the short-term contract, but he is a strong candidate to make Toronto's 25-man roster and head north at the end of camp.

On this opening week of Spring Training, all 30 Major League teams have one thing in common: optimism. Here's an optimism cheat sheet for each of them.

Who do the Blue Jays have in the pipeline? Get scouting reports, video, stats, projected ETAs and more for Toronto's Top 30 Prospects on MLB Pipeline's Prospect Watch.

Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins declined to get into a back-and-forth with Marcus Stroman on Sunday afternoon, sidestepping criticism of the organization from his right-handed starter.

The next five weeks will see lots of shuffling on Major League rosters. Here are the most intriguing positional battles on each of the 30 MLB clubs.

Freddy Galvis conceded things might eventually change, but the veteran infielder is under the impression that he will be the Blue Jays' everyday shortstop at the start of the season.

With each passing day, the hype continues to grow around Vladimir Guerrero Jr., but MLB Pipeline's top-ranked prospect seems to be keeping a pretty level head throughout all the chaos.

It's not rare to see former Major League sons in Major League uniforms, but is it unusual to find four in one clubhouse?

Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election, but asserting that he did became a prerequisite for Republicans standing for nomination to Congress or the Senate to win their primaries. An entire party became a vehicle for disinformation.1 Trump did win the 2024 presidential election, and key to that victory was building on the success of that lie. If you control enough of the information ecosystem, truth no longer matters.Another telling example: Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are not eating cats and dogs. US vice president elect, JD Vance, the source of that claim, admitted as much even as he justified it. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I'm going to do,” he said.2Disinformation in politics is nothing new. History is replete with claims that were fabricated to advance political aims. Although...

Terminally ill adults in England and Wales who are expected to die within six months would be able to get help to end their lives if their applications were approved by two doctors and a High Court judge, under proposed new legislation.1Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, who proposed the bill, said it provided the “strictest safeguards anywhere in the world.” The law would apply only to people who have full mental capacity and are terminally ill. Mental illness and disability are both excluded as eligibility criteria, and a person would need to declare twice in writing that they wanted to be helped to die.A person who wished to end their life would have to administer the medication themselves. It will remain illegal for a doctor or anybody else to end a person’s life. No doctor will be obliged to participate in any part of the process.The bill would also make it...

bmj;387/nov12_10/q2481/FAF1faJulia and Malcolm Donaldsondonaldson20241111.f1Malcolm Donaldson was a distinguished paediatric endocrinologist with a string of research publications to his name—but he was also happy to play second fiddle (almost literally) to his wife Julia, the celebrated author of much loved children’s books, including The Gruffalo and Room on the Broom.Malcolm, a talented musician and performer, accompanied his wife as she toured festivals, schools, and libraries in the UK and around the world. Together they performed the stories, with Malcolm acting characters ranging from an accident prone dragon to a comic cattle thief. His star role, in the words of Julia’s literary agent, was “a particularly suave fox” in The Gruffalo.Malcolm met Julia Shields when they were students at the University of Bristol and they married in 1972. Donaldson went on to work in Brighton, London, and Lyon, France, before moving back to Bristol to be a senior registrar in paediatrics. Six...

The current system for delivering NHS cardiovascular disease (CVD) health checks is not working effectively and must be reviewed to ensure that it reaches people with the highest risk, the National Audit Office has said.1In a review of the commissioning, delivery, and performance of CVD health checks the watchdog found that just over one in 12 people (8.8%) who were eligible attended a health check in 2023-24—which, if maintained, would equate to a five year coverage of 44%.Health checks were first introduced in 2009, with the aim of reducing ill health from CVD by offering everyone aged 40-74 without a pre-existing heart condition a check-up every five years. However, problems have arisen since the responsibility for commissioning these checks was transferred to local authorities in 2013, said the National Audit Office.The move led to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) losing its ability to influence local authority performance,...

A unique population of ventral tegmental area (VTA) neurons co-transmits glutamate and GABA. However, the circuit inputs to VTA VGluT2+VGaT+ neurons are unknown, limiting our understanding of their functional capabilities. By coupling monosynaptic rabies tracing with intersectional genetic targeting in male and female mice, we found that VTA VGluT2+VGaT+ neurons received diverse brainwide inputs. The largest numbers of monosynaptic inputs to VTA VGluT2+VGaT+ neurons were from superior colliculus (SC), lateral hypothalamus (LH), midbrain reticular nucleus, and periaqueductal gray, whereas the densest inputs relative to brain region volume were from the dorsal raphe nucleus, lateral habenula, and VTA. Based on these and prior data, we hypothesized that LH and SC inputs were from glutamatergic neurons. Optical activation of glutamatergic LH neurons activated VTA VGluT2+VGaT+ neurons regardless of stimulation frequency and resulted in flee-like ambulatory behavior. In contrast, optical activation of glutamatergic SC neurons activated VTA VGluT2+VGaT+ neurons for a brief period of time at high frequency and resulted in head rotation and arrested ambulatory behavior (freezing). Stimulation of glutamatergic LH neurons, but not glutamatergic SC neurons, was associated with VTA VGluT2+VGaT+ footshock-induced activity and inhibition of LH glutamatergic neurons disrupted VTA VGluT2+VGaT+ tailshock-induced activity. We interpret these results such that inputs to VTA VGluT2+VGaT+ neurons may integrate diverse signals related to the detection and processing of motivationally salient outcomes.

Goal-directed visual attention is a fundamental cognitive process that enables animals to selectively focus on specific regions of the visual field while filtering out irrelevant information. However, given the domain specificity of social behaviors, it remains unclear whether attention to faces versus nonfaces recruits different neurocognitive processes. In this study, we simultaneously recorded activity from temporal and frontal nodes of the attention network while macaques performed a goal-directed visual search task. V4 and inferotemporal (IT) visual category-selective units, selected during cue presentation, discriminated fixations on targets and distractors during the search but were differentially engaged by face and house targets. V4 and IT category-selective units also encoded fixation transitions and search dynamics. Compared with distractors, fixations on targets reduced spike–LFP coherence within the temporal cortex. Importantly, target-induced desynchronization between the temporal and prefrontal cortices was only evident for face targets, suggesting that attention to faces differentially engaged the prefrontal cortex. We further revealed bidirectional theta influence between the temporal and prefrontal cortices using Granger causality, which was again disproportionate for faces. Finally, we showed that the search became more efficient with increasing target-induced desynchronization. Together, our results suggest domain specificity for attending to faces and an intricate interplay between visual attention and social processing neural networks.

Somatosensory coding in rodents has been mostly studied in the whisker system and hairy skin, whereas the function of low-threshold mechanoreceptors (LTMRs) in the rodent glabrous skin has received scant attention, unlike in primates where the glabrous skin has been the focus. The relative activation of different LTMR subtypes carries information about vibrotactile stimuli, as does the rate and temporal patterning of LTMR spikes. Rate coding depends on the probability of a spike occurring on each stimulus cycle (reliability), whereas temporal coding depends on the timing of spikes relative to the stimulus cycle (precision). Using in vivo extracellular recordings in male rats and mice of either sex, we measured the reliability and precision of LTMR responses to tactile stimuli including sustained pressure and vibration. Similar to other species, rodent LTMRs were separated into rapid-adapting (RA) or slow-adapting based on their response to sustained pressure. However, unlike the dichotomous frequency preference characteristic of RA1 and RA2/Pacinian afferents in other species, rodent RAs fell along a continuum. Fitting generalized linear models to experimental data reproduced the reliability and precision of rodent RAs. The resulting model parameters highlight key mechanistic differences across the RA spectrum; specifically, the integration window of different RAs transitions from wide to narrow as tuning preferences across the population move from low to high frequencies. Our results show that rodent RAs can support both rate and temporal coding, but their heterogeneity suggests that coactivation patterns play a greater role in population coding than for dichotomously tuned primate RAs.

The activation of autonomic and hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) systems occurs interdependently with behavioral adjustments under varying environmental demands. Nevertheless, laboratory rodent studies examining the neural bases of stress responses have generally attributed increments in these systems to be monolithic, regardless of whether an active or passive coping strategy is employed. Using the shock probe defensive burying test (SPDB) to measure stress-coping features naturalistically in male and female rats, we identify a neural pathway whereby activity changes may promote distinctive response patterns of hemodynamic and HPA indices typifying active and passive coping phenotypes. Optogenetic excitation of the rostral medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) input to the ventrolateral periaqueductal gray (vlPAG) decreased passive behavior (immobility), attenuated the glucocorticoid hormone response, but did not prevent arterial pressure and heart rate increases associated with rats’ active behavioral (defensive burying) engagement during the SPDB. In contrast, inhibition of the same pathway increased behavioral immobility and attenuated hemodynamic output but did not affect glucocorticoid increases. Further analyses confirmed that hemodynamic increments occurred preferentially during active behaviors and decrements during immobility epochs, whereas pathway manipulations, regardless of the directionality of effect, weakened these correlational relationships. Finally, neuroanatomical evidence indicated that the influence of the rostral mPFC->vlPAG pathway on coping response patterns is mediated predominantly through GABAergic neurons within vlPAG. These data highlight the importance of this prefrontal->midbrain connection in organizing stress-coping responses and in coordinating bodily systems with behavioral output for adaptation to aversive experiences.

The sudden appearance of a visual distractor shortly before saccade initiation can capture spatial attention and modulate the saccade trajectory in spite of the ongoing execution of the initial plan to shift gaze straight to the saccade target. To elucidate the neural correlates underlying these curved saccades, we recorded from single neurons in the frontal eye field of two male rhesus monkeys shifting gaze to a target while a distractor with the same eccentricity appeared either left or right of the target at various delays after target presentation. We found that the population level of presaccadic activity of neurons representing the distractor location encoded the direction of the saccade trajectory. Stronger activity occurred when saccades curved toward the distractor, and weaker when saccades curved away. This relationship held whether the distractor was ipsilateral or contralateral to the recorded neurons. Meanwhile, visually responsive neurons showed asymmetrical patterns of excitatory responses that varied with the location of the distractor and the duration of distractor processing relating to attentional capture and distractor inhibition. During earlier distractor processing, neurons encoded curvature toward the distractor. During later distractor processing, neurons encoded curvature away from the distractor. This was observed when saccades curved away from distractors contralateral to the recording site and when saccades curved toward distractors ipsilateral to the recording site. These findings indicate that saccadic motor planning involves dynamic push–pull hemispheric interactions producing attraction or repulsion for potential but unselected saccade targets.