The target is the Georgia Network for Educational and Therapeutic Support, a network of special education programs accused of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Curtis Jones, a U.S. Army veteran, has led Georgia's Bibb County school system since 2015.

Curtis Jones, a U.S. Army veteran who has led Georgia's Bibb County school system since 2015, has been named the 2019 AASA National Superintendent of the Year.

Dougherty County, a largely black school district in an region heavily affected by coronavirus, is no longer subject to desegregation orders first imposed in 1963.

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.

In a case involving a transgender track athlete, the Trump administration says female transgender athletes are seeking "special treatment" to compete in girls' or women's sports.

The judge said the law likely discriminates on the basis of transgender status in violation of the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Legislators in New Hampshire turned down $46 million in federal charter school grants, concerned about continued costs once the money ran out.

The Granite State has legalized Keno gambling and plans to tax the machines to partially fund full-day kindergarten for the state's 5-year-olds.

Rural Iowa school superintendents and school board members unite to form new rural education advocacy group.

Challengers of state executive orders, to open schools for in-person instruction in some places and keep them closed in others, are having difficulty getting meaningful relief from the courts.

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

Could the Islanders potentially find themselves in a wild-card spot on Wednesday morning? In this economy?

When can we expect the Islanders to get healthy?

Kyle Connor could be the NHL's most underrated player, even after the Winnipeg Jets got off to a historic start. He could also become a bona fide star at the 4 Nations Face-Off.

The Oilers look to claw themselves up above .500 against the team that started their memorable turnaround last season.

Leon Draisaitl had two goals, including the overtime winner, and Connor McDavid had a goal and three assists to move one point shy of 1,000 for his career as the Edmonton Oilers beat the New York Islanders 4-3 on Tuesday night.

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

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

Caroline Fenton & Jason Fitz react to the second edition of the 2024 College Football Playoff Rankings, discuss Heisman pretenders vs. contenders and preview the biggest matchups of Week 12.

The court revived a lawsuit claiming that Mississippi's lack of a "uniform" education system violates the 1868 federal law that readmitted the state to the Union.

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?

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.

Terris Todd, a former teacher and school administrator in the Battle Creek, Mich., schools, is the ethnic vice chair of the Michigan Republican Party.

In a case that has drawn the involvement of the Trump administration, a federal judge holds that state rules limiting in-person instruction are not infringing on federal constitutional rights.

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.

Yang Hu
Feb 24, 2021; 41:1699-1715
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

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

Tessa E.S. Charlesworth
Sep 11, 2019; 39:7228-7243
Viewpoints

Evdokia Menelaou
Aug 8, 2012; 32:10925-10939
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

During adolescence, cannabis experimentation is common, and its association with interindividual variations in brain maturation well studied. Cellular and molecular underpinnings of these system-level relationships are, however, unclear. We thus conducted a three-step study. First, we exposed adolescent male mice to -9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) or a synthetic cannabinoid WIN 55,212-2 (WIN) and assessed differentially expressed genes (DEGs), spine numbers, and dendritic complexity in their frontal cortex. Second, in human (male) adolescents, we examined group differences in cortical thickness in 34 brain regions, using magnetic resonance imaging, between those who experimented with cannabis before age 16 (n = 140) and those who did not (n = 327). Finally, we correlated spatially these group differences with gene expression of human homologs of mouse-identified DEGs. The spatial expression of 13 THC-related human homologs of DEGs correlated with cannabis-related variations in cortical thickness, and virtual histology revealed coexpression patterns of these 13 genes with cell-specific markers of astrocytes, microglia, and a type of pyramidal cells enriched in dendrite-regulating genes. Similarly, the spatial expression of 18 WIN-related human homologs of DEGs correlated with group differences in cortical thickness and showed coexpression patterns with the same three cell types. Gene ontology analysis indicated that 37 THC-related human homologs are enriched in neuron projection development, while 33 WIN-related homologs are enriched in processes associated with learning and memory. In mice, we observed spine loss and lower dendritic complexity in pyramidal cells of THC-exposed animals (vs controls). Experimentation with cannabis during adolescence may influence cortical thickness by impacting glutamatergic synapses and dendritic arborization.

Large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have associated intronic variants in PDE4B, encoding cAMP-specific phosphodiesterase-4B (PDE4B), with increased risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as schizophrenia and substance use disorders that are often comorbid with it. However, the pathophysiological mechanisms of genetic risk involving PDE4B are poorly understood. To examine the effects of PDE4B variation on phenotypes with translational relevance to psychiatric disorders, we focused on PDE4B missense variant M220T, which is present in the human genome as rare coding variant rs775201287. When expressed in HEK-293 cells, PDE4B1-M220T exhibited an attenuated response to a forskolin-elicited increase in the intracellular cAMP concentration. In behavioral tests, homozygous Pde4b^M220T male mice with a C57BL/6JJcl background exhibited increased reactivity to novel environments, startle hyperreactivity, prepulse inhibition deficits, altered cued fear conditioning, and enhanced spatial memory, accompanied by an increase in cAMP signaling pathway-regulated expression of BDNF in the hippocampus. In response to a traumatic event (10 tone–shock pairings), neuronal activity was decreased in the cortex but enhanced in the amygdala and hippocampus of Pde4b^M220T mice. At 24 h post-trauma, Pde4b^M220T mice exhibited increased startle hyperreactivity and decreased plasma corticosterone levels, similar to phenotypes exhibited by PTSD patients. Trauma-exposed Pde4b^M220T mice also exhibited a slower decay in freezing at 15 and 30 d post-trauma, demonstrating enhanced persistence of traumatic memories, similar to that exhibited by PTSD patients. These findings provide substantive mouse model evidence linking PDE4B variation to PTSD-relevant phenotypes and thus highlight how genetic variation of PDE4B may contribute to PTSD risk.

The superior colliculus receives a direct projection from retinal ganglion cells. In primates, it remains unknown if the same ganglion cells also supply the lateral geniculate nucleus. To address this issue, a double-label experiment was performed in two male macaques. The animals fixated a target while injection sites were scouted in the superior colliculus by recording and stimulating with a tetrode. Once suitable sites were identified, cholera toxin subunit B-Alexa Fluor 488 was injected via an adjacent micropipette. In a subsequent acute experiment, cholera toxin subunit B-Alexa Fluor 555 was injected into the lateral geniculate nucleus at matching retinotopic locations. After a brief survival period, ganglion cells were examined in retinal flatmounts. The percentage of double-labeled cells varied locally, depending on the relative efficiency of retrograde transport by each tracer and the precision of retinotopic overlap of injection sites in each target nucleus. In counting boxes with extensive overlap, 76–98% of ganglion cells projecting to the superior colliculus were double labeled. Cells projecting to the superior colliculus constituted 4.0–6.7% of the labeled ganglion cell population. In one particularly large zone, there were 5,746 cells labeled only by CTB-AF555, 561cells double labeled by CTB-AF555 and CTB-AF488, but no cell labeled only by CTB-AF488. These data indicate that retinal input to the macaque superior colliculus arises from a collateral axonal branch supplied by ~5% of the ganglion cells that project to the lateral geniculate nucleus. Surprisingly, there exist no ganglion cells that project exclusively to the SC.

Aggression involves both sexually monomorphic and dimorphic actions. How the brain implements these two types of actions is poorly understood. We found that in Drosophila melanogaster, a set of neurons, which we call CL062, previously shown to mediate male aggression also mediate female aggression. These neurons elicit aggression acutely and without the presence of a target. Although the same set of actions is elicited in males and females, the overall behavior is sexually dimorphic. The CL062 neurons do not express fruitless, a gene required for sexual dimorphism in flies, and expressed by most other neurons important for controlling fly aggression. Connectomic analysis in a female electron microscopy dataset suggests that these neurons have limited connections with fruitless expressing neurons that have been shown to be important for aggression and signal to different descending neurons. Thus, CL062 is part of a monomorphic circuit for aggression that functions parallel to the known dimorphic circuits.

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.

In a new book, a curator at England's Natural History Museum describes rare and interesting nests and eggs—from the house sparrow to the village weaver—and the lessons they hold for avian conservation

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Marrakesh, 15 December 2014 – African Ministers of Agriculture recognized the facilitating role of FAO “under the new strategic framework established with the leadership of the [...]

Mr Chairman,

I wish to convey, through you, to the Committee on Fisheries, the considered views of the FAO Secretariat on the item on the proposed Fisheries University.  

So far, the [...]

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

Rome - The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and Grow Asia, a multi-stakeholder partnership platform that brings together farmers, the private sector, governments, [...]

Information Note.

Global exchange of information on compliance with national, regional, and international fisheries laws and regulations governing sustainable fishing is now possible with the launch of the Global [...]