The U.S. Army has awarded a $435 million contract for Repkon USA to build the nation's only TNT production facility in a rural community in Graham, Ky.

The three NASA astronauts that were part of the SpaceX Crew-8 aboard Crew Dragon Endeavour will speak publicly today for the first time since their mission returned to earth late last month.

In this ode to improvisation, musician and comedian Reggie Watts beatboxes, raps, loops his own rhythms and reflects upon the everyday power of turning the mundane into magic. After all, he says, we're all just making it up as we go along.

Nearly everyone in behavioral marketing and influence marketing was surprised when Dr. Robert Cialdini, the “godfather” of persuasion science and the creator of the celebrated Six Principles of Influence, introduced a seventh principle, Unity. In fact, in 2014 I asked Cialdini if, thirty years after completing his seminal book, Influence, he’d add on another one or […]

The post What is Unity, Cialdini’s 7th Principle? appeared first on Neuromarketing.

Researchers interviewed scores of principals in 19 states on how they’ve coped and the lessons they’re taking away from the pandemic’s disruption.

Wendy Shirey, principal of Pinecrest Academy Horizon in Henderson, Nev., was awarded the $25,000 cash prize, which is known as the "Oscars of Teaching."

The U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights said that some students were placed in self-contained special education settings without an individualized justification for doing so.

Students at Bellevue Elementary in Syracuse, N.Y., spend an extra 70 minutes at school each day, and their principal says the extended school day has improved their academic performance.

Dez-Ann Romain, a Brooklyn principal, is believed to be the first full-time, front-line educator to die from COVID-19.

The Tennessee department of education is proposing unsually comprehensive legislation that will require all current and new K-3 teachers, and those who train them, to know evidence-based reading instruction.

Now Newark, New Jersey, is exploding, thanks to the attempts at intimidation by Governor Christie's hand-picked superintendent of schools, Cami Anderson.

Democrat Gavin Newsom, who takes office Jan. 7, plans to expand full-day kindergarten and child-care offerings in the state, according to media reports.

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.

Biden's campaign announced March 31 that the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate backs two local attempts to raise more tax revenue for schools.

The Georgia Cyber Academy moved to stop using the company's curriculum and technology, a decision that K12 Inc. says violated an agreement between the two sides.

The school board in Gwinnett County, Ga., will shift from a 4-1 white Republican majority to a 3-2 Black Democratic majority, mirroring demographic changes in the county.

In this seventh installment on the growth in dual-language learning, two experts from Delaware explore how state education leaders can build capacity to support both students and educators.

South Carolina's public universities only produce enough teachers each year to fill half of the state's vacant teacher positions.

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

Gov. Erik Greitens has resigned and the board doesn't have enough governor-appointed members to form a quorum. Important tasks have been piling up.

In three days of rock climbing, orienteering, and other challenging outdoor experiences, principals get to examine their own—and others’—strengths and weaknesses as leaders.

Bethany Hill, the principal at Central Elementary School in Cabot, Ark., shuns a formal office in favor of roving around classrooms, hallways, the playground, and the cafeteria, where she can be as close as possible to teachers and students all day.

The U.S. Supreme Court took up the question of whether courts must find a juvenile offender permanently incorrigible before a sentence of life without parole.

While the Lady Vols volunteered at the Girls Inc. basketball clinic, they reminded Nicky Anosike of her own Tennessee teammates

Dan Skillings Jr. sidelined by surgery for Cincinnati Bearcats basketball

Jesse J. Langille
Jul 3, 2019; 39:5244-5246
Journal Club

Neuronal cytotoxic edema is implicated in neuronal injury and death, yet mitigating brain edema with osmotic and surgical interventions yields poor clinical outcomes. Importantly, neuronal swelling and its downstream consequences during early brain development remain poorly investigated, and new treatment approaches are needed. We explored Ca²⁺-dependent downstream effects after neuronal cytotoxic edema caused by diverse injuries in mice of both sexes using multiphoton Ca²⁺ imaging in vivo [Postnatal Day (P)12–17] and in acute brain slices (P8–12). After different excitotoxic insults, cytosolic GCaMP6s translocated into the nucleus after a few minutes in a subpopulation of neurons, persisting for hours. We used an automated morphology-detection algorithm to detect neuronal soma and quantified the nuclear translocation of GCaMP6s as the nuclear to cytosolic intensity (N/C ratio). Elevated neuronal N/C ratios occurred concurrently with persistent elevation in Ca²⁺ loads and could also occur independently from neuronal swelling. Electron microscopy revealed that the nuclear translocation was associated with the increased nuclear pore size. The nuclear accumulation of GCaMP6s in neurons led to neocortical circuit dysfunction, mitochondrial pathology, and increased cell death. Inhibiting calpains, a family of Ca²⁺-activated proteases, prevented elevated N/C ratios and neuronal swelling. In summary, in the developing brain, we identified a calpain-dependent alteration of nuclear transport in a subpopulation of neurons after disease-relevant insults leading to long-term circuit dysfunction and cell death. The nuclear translocation of GCaMP6 and other cytosolic proteins after acute excitotoxicity can be an early biomarker of brain injury in the developing brain.

Human sleep exhibits multiple, recurrent temporal regularities, ranging from circadian rhythms to sleep stage cycles and neuronal oscillations during nonrapid eye movement sleep. Moreover, recent evidence revealed a functional role of aperiodic activity, which reliably discriminates different sleep stages. Aperiodic activity is commonly defined as the spectral slope of the 1/frequency (1/f) decay function of the electrophysiological power spectrum. However, several lines of inquiry now indicate that the aperiodic component of the power spectrum might be better characterized by a superposition of several decay processes with associated timescales. Here, we determined multiple timescales, which jointly shape aperiodic activity using human intracranial electroencephalography. Across three independent studies (47 participants, 23 female), our results reveal that aperiodic activity reliably dissociated sleep stage-dependent dynamics in a regionally specific manner. A principled approach to parametrize aperiodic activity delineated several, spatially and state-specific timescales. Lastly, we employed pharmacological modulation by means of propofol anesthesia to disentangle state-invariant timescales that may reflect physical properties of the underlying neural population from state-specific timescales that likely constitute functional interactions. Collectively, these results establish the presence of multiple intrinsic timescales that define the electrophysiological power spectrum during distinct brain states.

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.

Key event-related potentials (ERPs) of perceptual decision-making such as centroparietal positivity (CPP) elucidate how evidence is accumulated toward a given choice. Furthermore, this accumulation can be impacted by visual target selection signals such as the N2 contralateral (N2c). How these underlying neural mechanisms of perceptual decision-making are influenced by the spatial congruence of distractors relative to target stimuli remains unclear. Here, we used electroencephalography (EEG) in humans of both sexes to investigate the effect of distractor spatial congruency (same vs different hemifield relative to targets) on perceptual decision-making. We confirmed that responses for perceptual decisions were slower for spatially incongruent versus congruent distractors of high salience. Similarly, markers of target selection (N2c peak amplitude) and evidence accumulation (CPP slope) were found to be lower when distractors were spatially incongruent versus congruent. To evaluate the effects of congruency further, we applied drift diffusion modeling to participant responses, which showed that larger amplitudes of both ERPs were correlated with shorter nondecision times when considering the effect of congruency. The modeling also suggested that congruency's effect on behavior occurred prior to and during evidence accumulation when considering the effects of the N2c peak and CPP slope. These findings point to spatially incongruent distractors, relative to congruent distractors, influencing decisions as early as the initial sensory processing phase and then continuing to exert an effect as evidence is accumulated throughout the decision-making process. Overall, our findings highlight how key electrophysiological signals of perceptual decision-making are influenced by the spatial congruence of target and distractor.

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A Smithsonian curator reflects back on the artistic legend, a "Renaissance man" with 28 Grammys to his name, who died Sunday at 91 years old

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 [...]

Rome - José Graziano da Silva, the [...]

Further to Council-endorsed adjustments to the 2016-17 Programme of Work and Budget (PWB) made in 2015, an assessment of the technical capacity of the Organization by a team of independent [...]

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 [...]

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

Vice president of engineering and chief evangelist at Google on the connected world in 2050

Author Harold Holzer discusses Abraham Lincoln's presidency and the President's lasting impact on modern American politics and nostalgia (Meredith Bragg). Read more at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/life-of-lincoln.html

Filmed by the famous photographer during the Spanish Civil War, this clip debuted at the 2010 Orphan Film Symposium

Behind the Scenes with Harry Rubenstein At the National Museum of American History (Beth Py-Lieberman, Ryan Reed and Molly Roberts). Read more at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/life-of-lincoln.html

Equipped with wings and a propeller, Moulton Taylor Aerocar aerobile was capable of taking off from a stoplight or the runway

National Portrait Gallery historian David C. Ward discusses images of Abraham Lincoln that document his life in the White House (Anika Gupta, Beth Py-Lieberman, Jesse Rhodes and Ryan Reed). Read more at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/life-of-lincoln.html

The southern widow's Maryland house was a crucial stop on the escape route for assassin John Wilkes Booth the night he shot the president. Read more about Abraham Lincoln at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/life-of-lincoln.html

Almost 66 million years ago, an asteroid hit Earth – and changed our planet forever. From tsunamis to shockwaves, join us on a journey through time as we explore the science behind this cataclysmic event. READ MORE about the last day of a dinosaur here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-last-day-in-the-life-of-an-edmontosaurus-180979932/ --- 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

More on the unsuccessful plot to kill Lincoln: http://j.mp/VnSZ9g During his inauguration tour in 1861, the president's life was threatened in the city of Baltimore.

The 16th president is widely celebrated for his role in helping to abolish slavery and preserving the Union during the Civil War. But did you know these facts about this iconic figure in American History? --- 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

Scientists have created "a form of information immortality" meant to instruct future species on how to recreate humans. But who, or what, will find it?