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.

In rural Kentucky, teachers and students are awarded innovation grants to solve a challenge facing their community or classroom.

Just because a rural school system has internet doesn’t mean everyone can afford it. That’s why James Barrett delivers paper work packets, along with meals, to his students during the COVID-19 crisis.

The switch to remote learning in rural New Mexico has left some students profoundly isolated—cut off from others and the grid by sheer distance.

The lawsuit alleged that rural districts in the state have been underfunded for years.

Legislation to provide funds to poor and rural school districts will likely die in the legislative session this year.

A budget amendment will provide funds to develop a teacher incentive program in rural areas.

State lawmakers must create a plan to improve rural schools in response to a 2014 state Supreme Court ruling.

The court-ordered plan fails to provide ways to improve rural schools, according to rural districts.

The study found that youth in rural New Hampshire have poor perceptions of job opportunities in the area, and are more likely to be depressed or abuse substances than other rural youth.

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

Arming some school staff provides a needed safety option for rural districts far from law enforcement, educators told the Federal School Safety Commission during an Arkansas site visit Wednesday.

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

Victoria Petersen, of the Peninsula Clarion on the Kenai Peninsula, will report on the challenges of rural education, especially in a state as vast as Alaska.

Internet connectivity, recruiting staff, and finding partners to learn from are all big challenges for an ed-tech leader in a district off the coast of Alaska.

A group of high school students from Anchorage spent spring break at a remote Native Village as part of an unusual cultural exchange program in Alaska. See what they learned.

Recruiters already are offering bonuses, free housing, and airfare to entice teachers to their remote districts—and the competition is about to get worse.

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.

The switch to remote learning in rural New Mexico has left some students profoundly isolated—cut off from others and the grid by sheer distance.

Steven F. Grieco
Nov 9, 2022; 42:8439-8449
Symposium and Mini-Symposium

Krista L. Hyde
Mar 11, 2009; 29:3019-3025
Development Plasticity Repair

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

Corey M. Ziemba
Oct 16, 2024; 44:e0349242024-e0349242024
Systems/Circuits

William W. Seeley
Dec 11, 2019; 39:9878-9882
Progressions

Randy L. Buckner
Aug 24, 2005; 25:7709-7717
Neurobiology of Disease

Bradley Voytek
Sep 23, 2015; 35:13257-13265
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Umut Güçlü
Jul 8, 2015; 35:10005-10014
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

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.

The visual world is richly adorned with texture, which can serve to delineate important elements of natural scenes. In anesthetized macaque monkeys, selectivity for the statistical features of natural texture is weak in V1, but substantial in V2, suggesting that neuronal activity in V2 might directly support texture perception. To test this, we investigated the relation between single cell activity in macaque V1 and V2 and simultaneously measured behavioral judgments of texture. We generated stimuli along a continuum between naturalistic texture and phase-randomized noise and trained two macaque monkeys to judge whether a sample texture more closely resembled one or the other extreme. Analysis of responses revealed that individual V1 and V2 neurons carried much less information about texture naturalness than behavioral reports. However, the sensitivity of V2 neurons, especially those preferring naturalistic textures, was significantly closer to that of behavior compared with V1. The firing of both V1 and V2 neurons predicted perceptual choices in response to repeated presentations of the same ambiguous stimulus in one monkey, despite low individual neural sensitivity. However, neither population predicted choice in the second monkey. We conclude that neural responses supporting texture perception likely continue to develop downstream of V2. Further, combined with neural data recorded while the same two monkeys performed an orientation discrimination task, our results demonstrate that choice-correlated neural activity in early sensory cortex is unstable across observers and tasks, untethered from neuronal sensitivity, and therefore unlikely to directly reflect the formation of perceptual decisions.

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.

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

February’s international symposium, entitled “The role of agricultural biotechnologies in sustainable food systems and nutrition”, will explore how the application of science and technology, and particularly agricultural biotechnologies, can benefit [...]

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 [...]

Since the 1990s, rural transformations have helped millions of people exit poverty while remaining in rural areas. This underscores an important fact: revitalising rural economies helps create jobs for rural [...]

The report will be released during a presentation on Monday, 17 September, at 11:30 CEST, in FAO-HQ, Sheikh Zayed Center.

This new edition of the report focuses on the complex [...]

Rome - The experience of farmers who manage agricultural heritage can help achieve the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration's main goals: support and scale-up efforts [...]

Rome - The FAO - Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems Programme opens the process of establishing a new Scientific Advisory Groupfor the 2021-2022 term.  The Programme is seeking for [...]

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, through the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) Programme, will organise the International Symposium on Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems and Family Farming from [...]

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), through the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) Programme, is organizing the International Conference on Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems 2021 [...]

Team on ground regrouped; strengthened with surge personnel; Declaration of corporate scale-up response

Information Note.

Three sites in China - an ancient tea-producing area, a nomadic livestock-rearing region and a rain-fed stone terrace farming system - were formally recognised  as Globally Important Agricultural Heritage [...]

2022 marks the 20th anniversary of the FAO GIAHS Programme. FAO launched the GIAHS initiative at the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg in 2002. Since its inception, [...]

This edition of The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets (SOCO) discusses how trade policies, based on both multilateral and regional approaches, can address today’s challenges for sustainable development. 

Rome - Two new sites in Japan - an inland fisheries and associated paddy farming system centred on the country’s largest lake and a traditional fruit-growing area  believed to have been the [...]

This edition of The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets (SOCO) discusses how trade policies, based on both multilateral and regional approaches, can address today’s challenges for sustainable development. Trade policies [...]

For the first time ever, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) will be hosting two back-to-back conferences looking at the challenges and solutions for sustainable livestock [...]

Salzburg – Austria, marked a significant milestone as it celebrated the formal recognition of Traditional Hay Milk Farming in the Austrian Alpine Arc as a FAO Globally Important Agricultural [...]

In this workshop, we will explore the role of innovation in supporting traditional practices that conserve agricultural heritage systems.  

Traditional agricultural practices, often rooted in the local communities and the knowledge [...]