A small school district in Oklahoma plans to offer low-cost daycare services to its employees next year in an effort to better compete with larger districts when it comes to recruiting and retaining teachers.

The money, which will be allocated over three years, is expected to make major and minor improvements to schools throughout the city.

Court-ordered school desegregation has been more successful in the South than in any other region of the country, but researchers have noted a new threat: the growing number of communities that are seceding from larger school districts to form their own.

The firing of a black staff member for repeating the n-word while telling a black student not to use it underscores how uneasy many districts, schools, and educators are with handling the use of racist language in any context.

The Urban Institute released a toolkit aimed at policymakers and investors interested in using private dollars to pay for public programs, such as prekindergarten.

There could be an 8.4 percent reduction in the U.S. teaching corps, and some states could see reductions as large as 20 percent, according to a new analysis by the Learning Policy Institute.

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

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

These tools encourage school administrators to gather as much information as possible about the students who will be entering kindergarten and the early-learning offerings in their communities.

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

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

Advocates argue the need is greater than ever and that failure to press school funding lawsuits in this moment would be a missed opportunity.

Some districts are scrambling to account for thousands of devices—a task made more urgent by the uncertainty over when students will be able to return to school buildings full-time.

One rural district says student-led conferences have boosted parent involvement rates.

Research from REL Midwest examines the student characteristics associated with early college success in Indiana, with a focus on financial aid.

A state leader shares how research helped raise important considerations for increasing college success and completion in Indiana.

New state mandates start next school year aimed at identifying and supporting students with dyslexia. The 2016 law also led to development of training for teachers.

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

Mississippi, Arkansas, and New Mexico have the highest percentages of students who lack adequate home technology for remote learning.

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

Voters in three southern states will head to the polls for governors races that have shined a spotlight on educator activism, school funding, and teacher pay.

Governors' races in Kentucky and Mississippi took center stage, testing the political muscle of teacher activists and yielding possible policy implications for everything from public employee pensions to teacher pay.

This year's November elections—a preview to next year's nationwide showdowns—cast their own spotlight on education, a dynamic that played out most prominently in the Kentucky governor's race, where teachers organized to unseat a combative incumbent who'd sparred with them.

Michael Martirano led the state's schools through dramatic budget cuts, academic challenges, and a state-versus-local battle over school construction.

Governors in several natural resource-dependent states said recently they will have to continue to cut public education funding because prices for oil and coal have not rebounded.

Teachers will receive a 5 percent raise, pending a vote by the state legislature. School will resume Thursday.

FSU women's basketball improves to 2-1 after a dominating victory over FAMU on Monday.

Laura Medlock
Apr 13, 2022; 42:3133-3149
Systems/Circuits

Michele Deodato
Oct 2, 2024; 44:e2308232024-e2308232024
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Prithviraj Rajebhosale
Oct 23, 2024; 44:e0063242024-e0063242024
Cellular

Neuregulin1 (Nrg1) signaling is critical for neuronal development and function from fate specification to synaptic plasticity. Type III Nrg1 is a synaptic protein which engages in bidirectional signaling with its receptor ErbB4. Forward signaling engages ErbB4 phosphorylation, whereas back signaling engages two known mechanisms: (1) local axonal PI3K-AKT signaling and (2) cleavage by -secretase resulting in cytosolic release of the intracellular domain (ICD), which can traffic to the nucleus (Bao et al., 2003; Hancock et al., 2008). To dissect the contribution of these alternate signaling strategies to neuronal development, we generated a transgenic mouse with a missense mutation (V₃₂₁L) in the Nrg1 transmembrane domain that disrupts nuclear back signaling with minimal effects on forward signaling or local back signaling and was previously found to be associated with psychosis (Walss-Bass et al., 2006). We combined RNA sequencing, retroviral fate mapping of neural stem cells, behavioral analyses, and various network analyses of transcriptomic data to investigate the effect of disrupting Nrg1 nuclear back signaling in the dentate gyrus (DG) of male and female mice. The V₃₂₁L mutation impairs nuclear translocation of the Nrg1 ICD and alters gene expression in the DG. V₃₂₁L mice show reduced stem cell proliferation, altered cell cycle dynamics, fate specification defects, and dendritic dysmorphogenesis. Orthologs of known schizophrenia (SCZ)-susceptibility genes were dysregulated in the V₃₂₁L DG. These genes coordinated a larger network with other dysregulated genes. Weighted gene correlation network analysis and protein interaction network analyses revealed striking similarity between DG transcriptomes of V₃₂₁L mouse and humans with SCZ.

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.

A recent exhibition shows how soldiers sent in votes during the Civil War and World War II, as many Americans would in 2020 following the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic

FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva will be away from Rome during the next few weeks. During this period he will be involved in a range of [...]

Resource Mobilization (RM) has replaced the term fundraising as it expanded to account for not only funds but also human resources, goods and services. It is a fundamental component of [...]

Informal Seminar: Human resources policies - Invitation for all Permanent Representatives

 Friday, 12 October 2018 - 15.00 to 17.30 (Green Room)

Ahead of the Food Systems Summit, join the Publications team to find out more about where to find FAO publications, the different formats available, how you can re-use the [...]

Ahead of the Food Systems Summit, join the Publications team to find out more about where to find FAO publications, the different formats available, how you can re-use the [...]

The Tripartite organizations (FAO, OIE, WHO) invite partners to join public discussion on the establishment of the AMR Multi-Stakeholder Partnership Platform.

Ahead of the Food Systems Summit, join the Publications team to find out more about where to find FAO publications, the different formats available, how you can re-use the [...]

Click here to access the presentation by QU Dongyu.

The barometer for world food commodity prices declined for the fifth consecutive month in August, as quotations for most benchmark items dropped, according to a new report released today by [...]