Texas A&M's Week 11 bye week was (hopefully) successful in terms of fixing the issues that plagued the Aggies, especially the defensive issues that led to 25 missed tackles in the 44-20 loss to South Carolina, which dropped the Aggies to No. 14 in the first Col

LSU landed 22nd in the latest College Football Rankings. Here’s a playoff picture for the Tigers. LSU fell seven spots, matching the tumble the Tigers took in the media polls. The fall was expected after Alabama boat raced LSU 42-13 in the Tiger Stadium. For LSU, the ranking…

The College Football Playoff selection committee released its second top-25 rankings of the season ahead of the first 12-team playoff, and unsurprisingly, the Oregon Ducks are still the No. 1 team. Of course, there are still many game

The second College Football Playoff top 25 rankings and a 12-team bracket projection were released on Tuesday. Tennessee (8-1, 5-1 SEC) is ranked No. 7 after defeating Mississippi State, 33-14, in Week 11. The Vols are also ranked No. 4 in the US LBM…

How did the Miami and Georgia losses impact the CFP rankings in their second release?

Georgia and Miami misery translates into joy for the Texas Longhorns. Thanks to losses by the 'Canes and Bulldogs on Saturday, the Horns move up two spots in the college football playoff ranki

Texas Longhorns fans were very happy after the second edition of the College Football Playoff rankings were released Tuesday.

The College Football Playoff Selection Committee has released its second set of rankings, and Clemson football's moved up to No. 20 following a 24-14 win over Virginia Tech. Starting at No. 23 in last week’s CFP rankings, the Tigers’ latest rise highlights thei

Here's a look at the College Football Playoff bracket and playoff picture after the latest committee rankings were released.

The second College Football Playoff rankings produced some positives and negatives for teams. Here are the winners and losers from Tuesday's reveal:

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?

The second College Football Playoff rankings dropped on Tuesday night with Oregon retaining its status as the No. 1 team in the country ahead of No. 2 Ohio State and No. 3 Texas. College Football Playoff:

Notre Dame football has one remaining game against a CFP-ranked team: Nov. 23 at Yankee Stadium against No. 24 Army (9-0).

Ohio State is No. 2 in the new CFP rankings, joining three other Big Ten teams in the top 5.

The second release of College Football Playoff rankings changes the projected bracket. Here's what it looks like if the season ended today.

Kansas State football actually benefitted from an open week in the latest College Football Playoff rankings.

Army moved up in the College Football Playoff rankings but new entry Tulane may challenge for hosting a potential conference title game.

There was some dramatic movement in the second College Football Playoff rankings. Here's who got slighted.

Indiana's magical season makes rare move into the College Football Playoff top five despite an embarrassingly easy schedule

We're now eleven weeks into the college football season and that means we have an idea of where Ohio State when it comes to the landscape of the 2024 season. The Buckeyes beat Penn State on the road two weeks ago to boost its resumé and remain right

Penn State moved up two spots to fourth Tuesday night in the second College Football Playoff rankings of the season. The Nittany Lions (8-1) were projected as the sixth seed in the 12-team playoff and would play 11th-seeded Mississippi in the first round Dec. 20 or 21 at Beaver Stadium in a rematch of last year’s Peach Bowl. In the initial rankings last week, Penn State was ranked sixth, ...

The Big Ten captured four of the top five spots led by Oregon and Ohio State.

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 Big Ten dominated the latest edition of the College Football Playoff (CFP) rankings, with the conference claiming four of the top five slots in the new standings revealed Tuesday night.

South Carolina football landed 21st in the latest CFP bracket. Here’s the College Football Playoff for the newly ranked No. 23 Gamecocks.

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 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.

FAO and French research institutions will step up cooperation in key research areas and coordinate their actions within the global framework of FAO’s renewed strategy. Two agreements signed today cover a [...]

FAO, IFAD and WFP have launched a brand new Rome-based agencies (RBA) website. The RBAs share a common vision, guiding principles for enhanced collaboration and distinctive strengths that build [...]

It’s a significant milestone – but what does the GFCM actually do? What has it achieved so far?

Since its creation, the GFCM has evolved into an efficient [...]

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.

In about four billion years from now, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will crash together Visualization: NASA, ESA, and F. Summers, STScI Simulation credit: NASA, ESA, G. Besla, Columbia University, and R. van der Marel, STScI

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

Read more about FDR at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/From-the-Castle-FDRs-Stamps.html A stamp collector since childhood, Franklin Roosevelt designed postage stamps to help promote his presidential agenda.

Selected by Donna Ferrato for our special issue, this up-and-coming photographer discusses his work

Watch a selection from the Smithsonian Institution's submission for the UNESCO Memory of the World Register of historic artifacts

New DNA analysis adds to growing research indicating the famous Pacific island did not collapse from overuse of resources before the arrival of Europeans

Owner George Frandsen has some 8,000 coprolites from dinosaurs, sharks and other creatures

Laboratory study of natural populations of mosquitoes can play a key role in determining the underlying causes of variation in burdens of mosquito-borne disease. Aedes aegypti is the main vector of the viruses that cause dengue, chikungunya, Zika, and yellow fever, making it a high priority for laboratory study. Ae. aegypti eggs provide an ideal starting point for new laboratory colonies. Eggs can be collected using ovicups, which are small plastic cups lined with seed-germination paper and partially filled with leaf-infused H₂O. Once collected, dry eggs will remain viable for months and can be safely transported long distances back to the laboratory as long as they are properly stored. This protocol provides step-by-step instructions for preparing for collecting, storing, and hatching Ae. aegypti eggs and has successfully yielded laboratory colonies from locations across both the native and invasive range of this species.

The Drosophila embryonic central nervous system has been used for decades as a model for understanding the genetic regulation of axon guidance and other aspects of neural development. Foundational studies using antibody staining to examine the embryonic ventral nerve cord in wild-type and mutant animals led to the discovery of evolutionarily conserved genes that regulate fundamental aspects of axon guidance, including midline crossing of axons. The development of the regular, segmentally repeating structure of axon pathways in the ventral nerve cord can illustrate basic principles of axon guidance to beginning students and can also be used by expert researchers to characterize new mutants, detect genetic interactions between known genes, and precisely quantify variations in gene function in engineered mutant lines. Here, we describe a protocol for collecting and fixing Drosophila embryos and visualizing axon pathways in the embryonic ventral nerve cord using immunofluorescence or immunohistochemical staining methods. As embryogenesis in Drosophila takes ~24 h to complete, a 1-d collection yields embryos representing all stages of development from newly fertilized through ready-to-hatch larvae, allowing investigation of multiple developmental events within a single batch of collected embryos. The methods described in this protocol should be accessible to introductory laboratory courses as well as seasoned investigators in established research laboratories.

All PCR- and DNA-based blood meal analyses require host DNA from a mosquito blood meal to be effectively preserved between the time when the specimen is collected and the extraction of DNA. As soon as a mosquito ingests blood from a host animal, digestion of host cells and cellular components within the blood meal by enzymes in the mosquito midgut begins to degrade the host DNA templates that are the targets of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplification. Without effective preservation, host DNA is typically undetectable by PCR 48 h after feeding, because of digestion. Preservation methods for mosquito blood meals vary in their efficacy, and the logistics of fieldwork can limit the options for preservation of blood meals and maintenance of the integrity of host DNA. This protocol describes a method of blood meal preservation that is effective, convenient, and amenable to fieldwork in remote locations where cryopreservation at –20°C or –80°C may not be feasible. It uses a Flinders Technology Associates (FTA) card, which is a chemically treated card that lyses cells and allows nucleic acids to be preserved. This method is also expected to preserve the DNA or RNA of pathogens present within the engorged mosquito abdomen, including RNA viruses.

Workers in Ontario are owed tens of millions of dollars in unpaid wages that the provincial government has yet to collect from employers, according to internal government records obtained by CBC Toronto.

The president of Mohawk College says a drop in international student enrolment at the Hamilton institution is facing a projected $50 million deficit in the 2025-2026 school year. That’s going to mean layoffs, he said.

Drivers are being warned to use caution on Saskatchewan's highways after five separate collisions involving moose were reported to RCMP in a 30-minute window on Friday evening.

Concerns are mounting over the potential environmental impact on fish populations following the destruction of Kamloops' historic Red Bridge, which collapsed into the South Thompson River during a fire.

A box found in a Saskatchewan attic, potentially holding millions of dollars worth of hockey cards, is going back up for auction after the original winning bidder never paid up, according to the auction company.

Two buildings collapsed on Hamilton’s Gore Park early Monday morning after being boarded up for over a decade. The fire department says no one was injured and the city has issued an emergency demolition order.

One person is dead after a motorcycle and an SUV collided in Mount Albert, Ont., on Monday, Ontario Provincial Police say.