Maryland's legislature has proposed a unique way to fund schools and also wants to hold school districts more accountable for how they spend their money as part of a new funding formula.

The political landscape for updating school finance systems won’t be any easier in the 2020 legislative season, despite a surging economy, state flexibility under ESSA, and single-party control in many states.

Even with remote learning, there are steps schools can take to reach stressed-out students without pathologizing them.

Several states this year sought to replace their funding formulas, a monumental fiscal and political feat, but only a handful of legislatures have been able to get proposals to their governors' desks.

Previous studies can provide a window into why math learning is taking a big hit during the pandemic, and what educators can do about it.

New Jersey used an incorrect method to calculate Medicaid reimbursements for services provided to students with disabilities, according to a federal audit, but the state disputes that claim.

Schools are "still dealing with the belief that children [with disabilities] can't be educated with their peers," says Nicki Vander Meulen, an autistic school board member in Madison, Wis.

School authorities in Utah have failed to report educator misconduct, possibly allowing teachers to offend again by moving to other schools, according to a new audit.

This fall, five South Carolina high schools will offer an aerospace curriculum to develop the next generation of aviation technology talent in a state where officials say the industry is thriving.

A program that lets retired teachers keep working while collecting retirement benefits is set to expire at the end of the month.

The state's board voted not to open the Common Core to revision, but its commissioner still plans to review them informally, with an eye to future changes.

A viral video of Dover, N.H., high school students singing a song about the Ku Klux Klan to the tune of "Jingle Bells" is causing outrage.

When Scott Gann learned his son Dustin had dyslexia, he was shocked at the school's reaction. No one there wanted to use the word.

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.

Primary season is now upon us. Here are three ideas for teaching in the wake of the Iowa caucus fallout.

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

A West Virginia official turns up the heat on financial disclosure for the state’s beleaguered schools, and ruffles feathers in the process.

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

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

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

Neural decoding is a tool for understanding how activities from a population of neurons inside the brain relate to the outside world and for engineering applications such as brain–machine interfaces. However, neural decoding studies mainly focused on different decoding algorithms rather than different neuron types which could use different coding strategies. In this study, we used two-photon calcium imaging to assess three auditory spatial decoders (space map, opponent channel, and population pattern) in excitatory and inhibitory neurons in the dorsal inferior colliculus of male and female mice. Our findings revealed a clustering of excitatory neurons that prefer similar interaural level difference (ILD), the primary spatial cues in mice, while inhibitory neurons showed random local ILD organization. We found that inhibitory neurons displayed lower decoding variability under the opponent channel decoder, while excitatory neurons achieved higher decoding accuracy under the space map and population pattern decoders. Further analysis revealed that the inhibitory neurons’ preference for ILD off the midline and the excitatory neurons’ heterogeneous ILD tuning account for their decoding differences. Additionally, we discovered a sharper ILD tuning in the inhibitory neurons. Our computational model, linking this to increased presynaptic inhibitory inputs, was corroborated using monaural and binaural stimuli. Overall, this study provides experimental and computational insight into how excitatory and inhibitory neurons uniquely contribute to the coding of sound locations.

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.

Harmonics are an integral part of music, speech, and vocalizations of animals. Since the rest of the auditory environment is primarily made up of nonharmonic sounds, the auditory system needs to perceptually separate the above two kinds of sounds. In mice, harmonics, generally with two-tone components (two-tone harmonic complexes, TTHCs), form an important component of vocal communication. Communication by pups during isolation from the mother and by adult males during courtship elicits typical behaviors in female mice—dams and adult courting females, respectively. Our study shows that the processing of TTHC is specialized in mice providing neural basis for perceptual differences between tones and TTHCs and also nonharmonic sounds. Investigation of responses in the primary auditory cortex (Au1) from in vivo extracellular recordings and two-photon Ca²⁺ imaging of excitatory and inhibitory neurons to TTHCs exhibit enhancement, suppression, or no-effect with respect to tones. Irrespective of neuron type, harmonic enhancement is maximized, and suppression is minimized when the fundamental frequencies (F₀) match the neuron's best fundamental frequency (BF₀). Sex-specific processing of TTHC is evident from differences in the distributions of neurons’ best frequency (BF) and best fundamental frequency (BF₀) in single units, differences in harmonic suppressed cases re-BF₀, independent of neuron types, and from pairwise noise correlations among excitatory and parvalbumin inhibitory interneurons. Furthermore, TTHCs elicit a higher response compared with two-tone nonharmonics in females, but not in males. Thus, our study shows specialized neural processing of TTHCs over tones and nonharmonics, highlighting local network specialization among different neuronal types.

A new study from Smithsonian scientists analyzes ant and fungus species, and uncovers the origins of their close partnership

A paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London chronicles the age of the famous and fascinating massive reptiles

FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva today praised UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon for his support in the fight against hunger at a meeting with FAO member countries, the Committee [...]

Prince Laurent of Belgium was today appointed FAO Special Ambassador for Forests and the Environment.

The announcement was made by FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva at the Organization’s Committee on [...]

The Thomson Reuters Foundation, the corporate charity of the world’s biggest news and information providers, is teaming up with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to improve [...]

Bagdad/Rome - FAO is scaling-up critical food and agriculture assistance to highly vulnerable rural households in Iraq thanks to a generous $14.7 million grant from Saudi Arabia. The donation is [...]

Scala Mercalli hosted by Italian environmentalist Luca Mercalli begins filming in the Sheikh Zayed Centre in FAO this week! 

Episodes will be shot in front of a live audience every Thursday [...]

South-South Cooperation is the mutual sharing and exchange of development solutions - knowledge, experiences and good practices, policies, technology and resources - between and among countries in the global [...]

The international community has committed to ending hunger and malnutrition by 2030. But can we overcome the obstacles that stand in the way of meeting this target?

The State [...]

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 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has the pleasure to inform the Permanent Representatives of the launch of a series of Activity Books for young people. [...]

The latest edition of The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World will be launched at the 2020 ECOSOC High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) [...]

Over the last twenty years, the FAO corporate website has expanded to meet diverse Organizational needs and promote the work of divisions and country offices across FAO. When Director [...]

On 5 November 2020, from 12.30 to 14.30hrs, FAO Director-General, Dr QU Dongyu, will host a virtual High-Level event launching the Food Coalition. This dialogue will call for international cooperation [...]

On 26 November 2020, 15:00 - 16:30 (CET), FAO will launch the 2020 edition of the State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA).

This year's edition of this flagship publication presents [...]

Understanding and managing disaster risks in global agriculture: Better data for ambitious action