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

The Minnesota Star Tribune review found that similar to traditional district schools, the highest performing charters generally served wealthier families.

An audit of the early-childhood education offerings in Minnesota finds complexity and fragmentation as well as a lack of data about program effectiveness.

Recent Census data finds households in the South and Midwest lagging those in other regions in access to remote learning technologies and learning interactions with teachers and family members.

Shea Weber gets inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame after an impressive career.

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.

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.

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.

Thousands of Washington’s kindergartners haven’t shown up or logged in to their public schools this year.

The second College Football Playoff rankings were released, with the big questions surrounding who would be No. 3 and where the SEC teams would land.

The second College Football Playoff rankings dropped on Tuesday night with Oregon retaining its status as the No. 1 team in the country ahead of No. 2 Ohio State and No. 3 Texas. College Football Playoff:

Tennessee won easily over Mississippi State. Indiana and BYU won nail-biters. So why did they jump over the Vols? We asked the CFP committee chair.

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

The GHSA football playoffs kick off Friday night with several area teams competing, while the GIAA playoffs move to the state semifinal round, where two local schools look to secure a spot in the championship game. Friday night’s matchups: Luella (5-5) at No. 6 Westover (9-1) Luella travels to Albany after finishing 4-2 in Region 5, capping their regular season with a 35-25 win over ...

While the Lady Vols volunteered at the Girls Inc. basketball clinic, they reminded Nicky Anosike of her own Tennessee teammates

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

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

Sharon G. Kujawa
Nov 11, 2009; 29:14077-14085
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Fadel Zeidan
Nov 18, 2015; 35:15307-15325
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Uri Hasson
Mar 5, 2008; 28:2539-2550
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Yulia Lerner
Feb 23, 2011; 31:2906-2915
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

α-Neurexins are essential and highly expressed presynaptic cell-adhesion molecules that are frequently linked to neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. Despite their importance, how the elaborate extracellular sequences of α-neurexins contribute to synapse function is poorly understood. We recently characterized the presynaptic gain-of-function phenotype caused by a missense mutation in an evolutionarily conserved extracellular sequence of neurexin-3α (A687T) that we identified in a patient diagnosed with profound intellectual disability and epilepsy. The striking A687T gain-of-function mutation on neurexin-3α prompted us to systematically test using mutants whether the presynaptic gain-of-function phenotype is a consequence of the addition of side-chain bulk (i.e., A687V) or polar/hydrophilic properties (i.e., A687S). We used multidisciplinary approaches in mixed-sex primary hippocampal cultures to assess the impact of the neurexin-3α^A687 residue on synapse morphology, function and ligand binding. Unexpectedly, neither A687V nor A687S recapitulated the neurexin-3α A687T phenotype. Instead, distinct from A687T, molecular replacement with A687S significantly enhanced postsynaptic properties exclusively at excitatory synapses and selectively increased binding to neuroligin-1 and neuroligin-3 without changing binding to neuroligin-2 or LRRTM2. Importantly, we provide the first experimental evidence supporting the notion that the position A687 of neurexin-3α and the N-terminal sequences of neuroligins may contribute to the stability of α-neurexin–neuroligin-1 trans-synaptic interactions and that these interactions may specifically regulate the postsynaptic strength of excitatory synapses.

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.

Sleep is known to drive the consolidation of motor memories. During nonrapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, the close temporal proximity between slow oscillations (SOs) and spindles ("nesting" of SO-spindles) is known to be essential for consolidation, likely because it is closely associated with the reactivation of awake task activity. Interestingly, recent work has found that spindles can occur in temporal clusters or "trains." However, it remains unclear how spindle trains are related to the nesting phenomenon. Here, we hypothesized that spindle trains are more likely when SOs co-occur in the prefrontal and motor cortex. We conducted simultaneous neural recordings in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and primary motor cortex (M1) of male rats training on the reach-to-grasp motor task. We found that intracortically recorded M1 spindles are organized into distinct temporal clusters. Notably, the occurrence of temporally precise SOs between mPFC and M1 was a strong predictor of spindle trains. Moreover, reactivation of awake task patterns is much more persistent during spindle trains in comparison with that during isolated spindles. Together, our work suggests that the precise coupling of SOs across mPFC and M1 may be a potential driver of spindle trains and persistent reactivation of motor memory during NREM sleep.

It is well established that holding information in working memory (WM) elicits sustained stimulus-specific patterns of neural activity. Nevertheless, here we provide evidence for a distinct class of neural activity that tracks the number of individuated items in working memory, independent of the type of visual features stored. We present two EEG studies of young adults of both sexes that provide robust evidence for a signal tracking the number of individuated representations in working memory, regardless of the specific feature values stored. In Study 1, subjects maintained either colors or orientations across separate blocks in a single session. We found near-perfect generalization of the load signal between these two conditions, despite being able to simultaneously decode which feature had been voluntarily stored. In Study 2, participants attended to two features with very distinct cortical representations: color and motion coherence. We again found evidence for a neural load signal that robustly generalized across these distinct visual features, even though cortically disparate regions process color and motion coherence. Moreover, representational similarity analysis provided converging evidence for a content-independent load signal, while simultaneously showing that unique variance in EEG activity tracked the specific features that were stored. We posit that this load signal reflects a content-independent "pointer" operation that binds objects to the current context while parallel but distinct neural signals represent the features that are stored for each item in memory.

Different people listening to the same story may converge upon a largely shared interpretation while still developing idiosyncratic experiences atop that shared foundation. What linguistic properties support this individualized experience of natural language? Here, we investigate how the "concrete–abstract" axis—the extent to which a word is grounded in sensory experience—relates to within- and across-subject variability in the neural representations of language. Leveraging a dataset of human participants of both sexes who each listened to four auditory stories while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging, we demonstrate that neural representations of "concreteness" are both reliable across stories and relatively unique to individuals, while neural representations of "abstractness" are variable both within individuals and across the population. Using natural language processing tools, we show that concrete words exhibit similar neural representations despite spanning larger distances within a high-dimensional semantic space, which potentially reflects an underlying representational signature of sensory experience—namely, imageability—shared by concrete words but absent from abstract words. Our findings situate the concrete–abstract axis as a core dimension that supports both shared and individualized representations of natural language.

Seven guest collaborators bring new eyes to a Smithsonian museum founder’s collection of American art

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

A Smithsonian curator reflects back on the artistic legend, a "Renaissance man" with 28 Grammys to his name, who died Sunday at 91 years old

The [...]

With rapid soil degradation, fast depletion of groundwater, excessive use of pesticides-fertilizers and extreme weather events all collectively putting stress on farming and forestry, it is time to recognise the [...]

India's Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA) and FAO are strengthening their collaboration to boost rural development and reduce poverty in Asia and Africa via local initiatives focused on empowering rural [...]

Although we have made progress towards building a better world, too many people have been left behind. People who are unable to benefit from human development, innovation or economic growth.

In [...]

FAO has recently released Fish: Know it, cook it, eat it, a genre-defying cookbook that infuses international recipes with insights into the global fish trade; blends scientific facts and cultural history; melds nutritional information [...]

Must we choose between food security and climate neutrality? How do we make sure food imports are safe? How do low-income countries move up the food [...]

While Thomas Edison is best-known for inventing the lightbulb, it's often forgotten that he also set up the world's first movie studio, in Fort Lee, New Jersey

In this one-minute video, our Ask Smithsonian host, Eric Schulze, explains what causes wind. The answer might blow you away.

Discover evidence of natural selection and evolution at the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum (Meredith Bragg)

After mapping the movement of stars for years, astronomers believe they have found a black hole at the center of the Milky Way

A large portion of Indiana's economy relies on an invaluable crop: corn. Popcorn plants like Pop Weaver have perfected the production of our favorite movie snack down to a science.

Director of the African American History and Culture Museum Lonnie Bunch looks at the forces that brought about the January 1, 1863 order.

The first plane to fly nonstop from New York to Paris will reside on the ground level of the National Air and Space Museum for the next five months as it undergoes preservation (Courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum)

Take an animated tour of the future Giant Magellan Telescope