When monarch butterflies migrate, they produce one of the most iconic wildlife spectacles in the world — and provide us with an important indicator of ecological health, says photographer Jaime Rojo. Telling a story about our relationship to the natural world, he shares his experience photographing these mesmerizing insects deep in their remote mountain habitats in Mexico, diving into the latest research into the mysteries of their multi-thousand-mile journey and sharing how each of us can join the growing movement to protect them.

Over his decades of farming and ranching, Gabe Brown has noticed a troubling trend: the conventional farming techniques he used were degrading the soil and harming nature. He shares how his family farm turned things around by adopting regenerative agricultural practices — and shows how the wider food system can use these same methods to improve food quality and revitalize the land.

Jordan Johnson and Aidan Carberry, the choreographic duo known as JA Collective, give a performance of dance and visual arts, alternating between abrupt and fluid, tense and dreamlike.

TED Fellow and renewable energy expert Norah Magero envisions an Africa that pioneers its own technological future, shifting the narrative from dependence and consumption to self-reliance and innovation. She shares how she developed VacciBox — a solar-powered refrigeration system made in Kenya to keep vaccines cold in off-grid areas — and highlights the power of homegrown solutions to transform health care.

The new U.S. Department of Education guidance creates a federal process for individuals and organizations to file complaints under the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, has become increasingly critical of charter schools this year, and his new proposals for charters would change how they operate and how they are funded.

New report on Oregon's tribal students show they start out behind, miss more school, and are more likely to drop out.

Gov. Kate Brown ordered the public release of annual school performance ratings last week after Oregon's biggest newspaper reported that a Brown appointee had delayed the release of the statistical rankings until after the high-stakes gubernatorial election Nov. 6.

Here are strategies for creating strong, respectful, productive relationships between superintendents and school boards.

A strategy that gives more learning time in small groups of students without taking time away from core instruction.

Public and private schools named for leaders of the Confederacy have come under renewed scrutiny amid the national Black Lives Matter protests.

School districts must make amends for their racist history, writes Daarel Burnette II. What should that look like?

The New York state legislature passed a bill that would make the use of state test scores in these evaluations optional, leaving the decision up to districts and making it subject to collective bargaining.

A Nebraska senator introduced a bill that would give teachers legal cover to physically restraint disruptive students, prompting a strong positive response from members of the state teachers' union.

A K-8 charter school has opened in Livingston, Ala., that is making history.

An Education Week analysis found that at least 140 schools, almost all below the Mason-Dixon line, still bear the names of figures from that era.

Virginia Gov.-elect Ralph Northam has said he would further restrict that state's charter laws, and New Jersey Gov.-elect Phil Murphy has promised to pull the state out of the PARCC testing consortium.

Federal watchdogs find that Utah inflated its high school graduation rate in the last of a series of reports warning states not to make end runs around the rules for calculating graduation rates.

The school board in Gwinnett County, Ga., will shift from a 4-1 white Republican majority to a 3-2 Black Democratic majority, mirroring demographic changes in the county.

Charter schools are playing a notable role in remarks about education from candidates like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Yet it's not clear what if any role they'll have in important states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

With their state’s caucuses the first official marker in the 2020 presidential contest, Iowa teenagers are in a unique position to observe and participate.

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 principal of an elementary school in Washington, DC, describes how she and her staff broadened the focus of the school towards broader, more holistic goals for students.

The principal of a school in Washington, DC, describes a shift toward equity, diversity, and inclusion.

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

Nov. 11—Class 3A preseason No. 1 Greensburg opened the season Friday with an 81-23 victory over Jac-Cen-Del. The Lady Pirates opened the scoring with a steal and layup by Mylie Wilkison. After buckets by Clarie Larrison, Mary Harmon, Wilkison and Leah West, the Lady Pirates led 10-0. JCD got on the board with a 3-pointer by Brooklyn Simon. It was all Greensburg from there in the first quarter. ...

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

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

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

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

Pietro Mazzoni
Apr 5, 2006; 26:3642-3645
BRIEF COMMUNICATION

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

Kong-Fatt Wong
Jan 25, 2006; 26:1314-1328
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

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

As evidence mounts that the cardiac-sympathetic nervous system reacts to challenging cognitive settings, we ask if these responses are epiphenomenal companions or if there is evidence suggesting a more intertwined role of this system with cognitive function. Healthy male and female human participants performed an approach-avoidance paradigm, trading off monetary reward for painful electric shock, while we recorded simultaneous electroencephalographic and cardiac-sympathetic signals. Participants were reward sensitive but also experienced approach-avoidance "conflict" when the subjective appeal of the reward was near equivalent to the revulsion of the cost. Drift-diffusion model parameters suggested that participants managed conflict in part by integrating larger volumes of evidence into choices (wider decision boundaries). Late alpha-band (neural) dynamics were consistent with widening decision boundaries serving to combat reward sensitivity and spread attention more fairly to all dimensions of available information. Independently, wider boundaries were also associated with cardiac "contractility" (an index of sympathetically mediated positive inotropy). We also saw evidence of conflict-specific "collaboration" between the neural and cardiac-sympathetic signals. In states of high conflict, the alignment (i.e., product) of alpha dynamics and contractility were associated with a further widening of the boundary, independent of either signal's singular association. Cross-trial coherence analyses provided additional evidence that the autonomic systems controlling cardiac-sympathetics might influence the assessment of information streams during conflict by disrupting or overriding reward processing. We conclude that cardiac-sympathetic control might play a critical role, in collaboration with cognitive processes, during the approach-avoidance conflict in humans.

Neuroinflammation can positively influence axon regeneration following injury in the central nervous system. Inflammation promotes the release of neurotrophic molecules and stimulates intrinsic proregenerative molecular machinery in neurons, but the detailed mechanisms driving this effect are not fully understood. We evaluated how microRNAs are regulated in retinal neurons in response to intraocular inflammation to identify their potential role in axon regeneration. We found that miR-383-5p is downregulated in retinal ganglion cells in response to zymosan-induced intraocular inflammation. MiR-383-5p downregulation in neurons is sufficient to promote axon growth in vitro, and the intravitreal injection of a miR-383-5p inhibitor into the eye promotes axon regeneration following optic nerve crush. MiR-383-5p directly targets ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF) receptor components, and miR-383-5p inhibition sensitizes adult retinal neurons to the outgrowth-promoting effects of CNTF. Interestingly, we also demonstrate that CNTF treatment is sufficient to reduce miR-383-5p levels in neurons, constituting a positive-feedback module, whereby initial CNTF treatment reduces miR-383-5p levels, which then disinhibits CNTF receptor components to sensitize neurons to the ligand. Additionally, miR-383-5p inhibition derepresses the mitochondrial antioxidant protein peroxiredoxin-3 (PRDX3) which was required for the proregenerative effects associated with miR-383-5p loss-of-function in vitro. We have thus identified a positive-feedback mechanism that facilitates neuronal CNTF sensitivity in neurons and a new molecular signaling module that promotes inflammation-induced axon regeneration.

Dopamine (DA) and norepinephrine (NE) have been repeatedly implicated in neuropsychiatric vulnerability, in part via their roles in mediating the decision-making processes. Although two neuromodulators share a synthesis pathway and are coactivated under states of arousal, they engage in distinct circuits and modulatory roles. However, the specific role of each neuromodulator in decision-making, in particular the exploration–exploitation tradeoff, remains unclear. Revealing how each neuromodulator contributes to exploration–exploitation tradeoff is important in guiding mechanistic hypotheses emerging from computational psychiatric approaches. To understand the differences and overlaps of the roles of these two catecholamine systems in regulating exploration, a direct comparison using the same dynamic decision-making task is needed. Here, we ran male and female mice in a restless two-armed bandit task, which encourages both exploration and exploitation. We systemically administered a nonselective DA antagonist (flupenthixol), a nonselective DA agonist (apomorphine), a NE beta-receptor antagonist (propranolol), and a NE beta-receptor agonist (isoproterenol) and examined changes in exploration within subjects across sessions. We found a bidirectional modulatory effect of dopamine on exploration. Increasing dopamine activity decreased exploration and decreasing dopamine activity increased exploration. The modulatory effect of beta-noradrenergic receptor activity on exploration was mediated by sex. Reinforcement learning model parameters suggested that dopamine modulation affected exploration via decision noise and norepinephrine modulation affected exploration via sensitivity to outcome. Together, these findings suggested that the mechanisms that govern the exploration–exploitation transition are sensitive to changes in both catecholamine functions and revealed differential roles for NE and DA in mediating exploration.

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.