"We have a responsibility to save lives," Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said on Twitter. "We could have waited to close schools, but based on advice from health experts, this is the time to do it."

The state's elected superintendent and the governor-appointed state board have been in a legal dispute since 2016 over who should oversee the many tasks of the education department.

Thousands of North Carolina teachers will take leave on May 16 to protest at the state capitol, forcing some school districts to close.

After the midterm elections, Oklahoma teacher Amanda Becker reflects on the future of teacher activism in the state.

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.

The state wants to test its middle school students in the mathematics courses in which they're enrolled, rather than with the state tests created for that each student's particular grade.

This Flyers rookie dominated in his return to the lineup.

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 West Virginia House of Delegates passed its version of a sweeping education omnibus bill, which would allow the state's first charter schools.

A federal investigation of Chicago's failures to respond to sexual violence in schools raises troubling questions for school districts nationwide.

Early in the second half, Ohio State freshman Jaloni Cambridge went down with an apparent lower-back injury.

Nov. 12—The Gonzaga women's basketball team has much to learn after a challenging loss at Stanford on Sunday. Losses have a way of exposing a team's shortcomings. And there is much to learn from the worst loss (89-58) in coach Lisa Fortier's 11 seasons. Stanford, unranked in the preseason poll for the first time since 1999-2000, is unranked no more. The Cardinal (3-0) entered at No. 24 in the ...

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

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

Gijs Joost Brouwer
Nov 4, 2009; 29:13992-14003
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

When faced with danger, human beings respond with a repertoire of defensive behaviors, including freezing and active avoidance. Previous research has revealed a pattern of physiological responses, characterized by heart rate bradycardia, reduced visual exploration, and heightened sympathetic arousal in reaction to avoidable threats, suggesting a state of attentive immobility in humans. However, the electrocortical underpinnings of these behaviors remain largely unexplored. To investigate the visuocortical components of attentive immobility, we recorded parieto-occipital alpha activity, along with eye movements and autonomic responses, while participants awaited either an avoidable, inevitable, or no threat. To test the robustness and generalizability of our findings, we collected data from a total of 101 participants (76 females, 25 males) at two laboratories. Across sites, we observed an enhanced suppression of parieto-occipital alpha activity during avoidable threats, in contrast to inevitable or no threat trials, particularly toward the end of the trial that prompted avoidance responses. This response pattern coincided with heart rate bradycardia, centralization of gaze, and increased sympathetic arousal. Furthermore, our findings expand on previous research by revealing that the amount of alpha suppression, along with centralization of gaze, and heart rate changes predict the speed of motor responses. Collectively, these findings indicate that when individuals encounter avoidable threats, they enter a state of attentive immobility, which enhances perceptual processing and facilitates action preparation. This state appears to reflect freezing-like behavior 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.

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.

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 [...]

FAO’s responses to the crisis in Ukraine and its impacts on global food security: data analyses, policy recommendations, and actions on the ground.

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

Data analyses, policy recommendations, and actions on the ground.

Your feedback on the First Continental Congress, Douglas MacArthur and England's tangled history

To soar over Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire is to be transported back in time to the age of William Shakespeare, a man born in humble circumstances who would go on to become the most celebrated writer of all time.

The American Ingenuity Award winner on the connection between history and music

Teeth are key to identifying elderly remains

In the ’90s, many scientists disputed an epidemiologist’s warning that the fast-paced life extension of the 20th century would plateau. Now, a new study suggests he was right

While testing the "infinite monkey theorem," mathematicians found that the odds of a chimpanzee typing even a short phrase like "I chimp, therefore I am" before the death of the universe are 1 in 10 million billion billion

People using the library in the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John's are being forced to use alternate entrances due to an unsafe staircase in front of the building.

Atlantic salmon returns were at their lowest level ever this year, say researchers, who are nevertheless refusing to give up hope that the population can rebound.

Para Roberto Ramírez de Costa Rica, servir a Dios en misiones ha sido un paso de fe tras otro. Perdió su trabajo, su estabilidad financiera e incluso a su prometida, pero ganó mucho más.

In the pouring rain in downtown Charlottetown, hundreds gathered to pay their respects to veterans and remember the fallen.

Sault Ste. Marie has the highest rate of opioid deaths in Ontario so far this year, according to new numbers from the province's coroner's office.

A Winnipeg business owner is suing a man she alleges swindled her out of ownership of two properties after promising financial help — the latest in a string of court proceedings against the man, whom a judge previously described as showing the signs of a "predator" who seeks out financially vulnerable clients.

The last time a snowfall was recorded at the Winnipeg airport was on April 19, making it 206 days without any snow. Normally, Winnipeggers would see the first snowfall in October.

The family of forklift operator Bill Sherstobitoff says that the company he worked for, the Great Little Box Company (GLBC), has not made enough of an effort to make things right in the two years since his death in December 2022.

Vanessa James and Eric Radford withdrew from the pairs competition at the Canadian figure skating championships before Saturday's free program in Ottawa.

Analysis of taste sensory responses has been a powerful approach for understanding principles of taste detection and coding. The shared architecture of external taste sensing units, called sensilla, in insects opened up the study of tastant-evoked responses in any model of choice using a single-sensillum tip recording method that was developed in the mid-1900s. Early studies in blowflies were instrumental for identifying distinct taste neurons based on their responses to specific categories of chemicals. Broader system-wide analyses of whole organs have since been performed in the genetic model insect Drosophila melanogaster, revealing principles of stereotypical organization and function that appear to be evolutionarily conserved. Although limited in scope, investigations of taste sensory responses in mosquitoes showcase conservation in sensillar organization, as well as in groupings of functionally distinct taste neurons in each sensillum. The field is now poised for more thorough dissections of mosquito taste function, which should be of immense value in understanding close-range chemosensory interactions of mosquitoes with their hosts and environment. Here, we provide an introduction to the basic structure of a taste sensillum and functional analysis of the chemosensory neurons within it.

U.K. company cut weeks out of design time, eliminated prototyping, and increased innovation with SOLIDWORKS and CircuitWorks

SOLIDWORKS CAD and Simulation are Key Links in Goal to Cut Up to 90 percent from Design and Construction Time

In spite of difficult circumstances and a change in plans, the Freedom Climbers did what they set out to do.

Wynand van Vuuren, client experience partner at King Price insurance, unpacks the rights and responsibilities of a consumer when it comes to insurance.

The parents of a 16-year-old who died last fall from football-related brain trauma are suing the New York school districts he played for and the medical responders who tended to him the night he sustained his fatal injury.

The ANC is fully and entirely responsible for the crisis of electricity in South Africa for the past 17 years, and electricity minister Kgosientsho Ramokgopa knows it, says Sikonathi Mantshantsha.

Nationally, at least five million children have at least one parent who is undocumented. Supporting those children should be a priority if the threat of a raid is not imminent, advocates said.

Makeda Brome, Pia Hansen, Linda Gojak, Marian Small, Kenneth Baum and David Krulwich share their thoughts on the biggest challenges facing math teachers.

Boys and girls start out on the same biological footing when it comes to math, finds the first neuroimaging study of math gender differences in children, published this month in the journal Science of Learning.

A coalition of education organizations wants Congress to waive a provision in federal law requiring districts to keep special education funding level from year to year regardless of budget pressures.

Marc Tucker responds to Checker Finn's recent critique of the new international teacher quality study from NCEE and Linda Darling-Hammond, Empowered Educators.