Grandiosity and confidence may lead to psychological benefits.

A businessman, Patrick served two terms as governor of Massachusetts and has credited education with his own dramatic rise to success.

Thousands of teachers will head to the state capital on Wednesday to call for a nearly $10,000 raise over four years and an increase to per-pupil spending.

A new study says that problems surrounding child-care hurt Georgia parents economically in many ways including in turned down promotions and having to cut back on work and school hours.

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.

It's possible there could be an eight-way tie atop the SEC standings at the end of the regular season. Then what will the College Football Playoff committee do?

Players and coaches said they had a good time playing in the Queen City.

Donna M. Wilcock
May 1, 2003; 23:3745-3751
Development Plasticity Repair

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.

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.

FAO is making publically available for the first time, a series of internal documents relating to programme and project management, among others. These documents range from the guidelines on the [...]

The FMM is a funding mechanism for partners willing to contribute unearmarked funds or slightly earmarked funds. Created in 2010, the FMM is currently supported by the Kingdoms of Belgium, [...]

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 (FAO), through the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) Programme, is organizing the International Conference on Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems 2021 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Read the series on how FAO increased efficiency, effectiveness and transparency to better support its Members in the transformation of agrifood systems.

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 [...]

Indonesia and Sao Tome and Principe receive their first designations from FAO along with Austria’s second system

Human beings and chimps share as much as 98 percent of their DNA. If our species are so similar, can chimps be genetically engineered to be more like us?

Christopher Gray | Smithsonian Magazine’s 2016 American Ingenuity Award Winner for Youth Achievement Christopher Gray is the founder and CEO of Scholly, the groundbreaking web and mobile app that matches current or future college students who need financial support with scholarships that can help them. Scholly has been downloaded 850,000 times and has connected college students with some $50 million in scholarships. Philadelphia-based Gray, an ABC “Shark Tank” winner and recipient of a $100,000 grant from philanthropist Steve Case’s Rise of the Rest competition, sees his digital platform as a 21st-century tool for helping countless young Americans achieve their college dreams without piling on crushing debt.

More on Kathleen Turner and her show at Arena Stage: http://j.mp/T0IkkZ Before taking the stage in "Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins," Academy Award nominee Kathleen Turner discusses the woman who inspired the show.

You might think twice about picking that chip off the carpet and putting it into your mouth.

It's 1933 and Mae West is just arriving at Grauman's Chinese Theater for the premiere of I'm No Angel. It draws fans from all over the country—as well as an organized protest from conservative religious groups.

In 1945, Maraquita Sargeant was admitted to a mental institution in Australia against her will and remained their for 22 years - produced by Matt Cleaves and George Clipp

Smithsonian magazine's poetry consultant recites his poem commissioned for a special photography issue

This is video of the new hermit crab species Pylopaguropsis mollymullerae taken by Ellen Muller at dive site 'Something Special', southern Caribbean. Credit: Rafael Lemaitre and Ellen Muller

The science behind rat zombies

Lola, a Lagotto Romagnolo trained to sniff out and dig up black truffles in her native Washington, is ready for a challenge: to find truffles out of season on a hot day where their distinctive odor dissipates really quickly. Video courtesy of Smithsonian Channel.

Two titans of the era went head-to-head in a heated race for the presidency. The stakes were high. The very future of a young nation hung in the balance. Join us as we explore the revolutionary ideas that shaped this critical moment in American democracy. --- For more videos from Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/ Digital Editorial Director: Brian Wolly Supervising Producer & Scriptwriter: Michelle Mehrtens Video Editor: Sierra Theobald

The American Ingenuity Award winner is using geographic information systems to map history's most iconic landscapes

Quiksilver captures stunning aerial views of the world champion surfer's dazzling technique

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Teeth are key to identifying elderly remains

The artist's cityscapes, once dismissed as too masculine, would later influence the floral artworks that became central to her iconic style

The show coincides with an initiative that will give away 49 of the tree's saplings to individuals and communities across the country

Two comb jellies can merge their digestive and nervous systems and even sync their bodily functions, according to new research. The discovery could have implications for human medicine

A new study suggests the seismic energy traveled outward from a previously unmapped fault, emanating from the hypocenter in bouncing waves that shook distant areas

The tongues of bird-like dinosaurs and pterosaurs, however, may have been more mobile