Teacher-evaluation reforms in places like New Mexico, Tennessee, Denver, and the District of Columbia have paid off, says the National Council on Teacher Quality.

The pilot, which was initially one of the most buzzed about pieces of ESSA, allows states to try out new forms of testing in a handful of districts, with the goal of eventually taking them statewide.

"I'm running because I'm not happy with the state of education," said veteran educator Kevin Leineweber, who is one of several teachers running for the state's legislature this year.

Research from REL Midwest examines the student characteristics associated with early college success in Indiana, with a focus on financial aid.

A state leader shares how research helped raise important considerations for increasing college success and completion in Indiana.

Thousands of Indiana teachers are scrambling to begin renewing their professional teaching licenses before new rules that state lawmakers approved this spring take effect July 1.

Teachers across the state are outraged over a new rule that requires 15 hours of workforce-related professional development.

A suburban Indianapolis district is signing up teachers to drive school buses before and after their usual time in the classroom.

The Indiana state teachers' union is pushing to protect student and staff safety during active-shooter trainings.

This Quality Counts 2019 Highlights Report captures all the data you need to assess your state's performance on key educational outcomes.

This Quality Counts 2020 Highlights Report captures all the data you need to assess your state's performance on key educational outcomes.

The teachers say they've suffered emotional distress and anxiety for months after being shot at with plastic bullets in a voluntary active-shooter drill in 2019.

The Minnesota Star Tribune review found that similar to traditional district schools, the highest performing charters generally served wealthier families.

The Montreal Canadiens snapped a six-game losing streak with a 7-5 come-from-behind victory against the Buffalo Sabres on Remembrance Day.

The Montreal Canadiens sit near the bottom of the NHL standings, fuelling more speculation about trade targets.

The Montreal Canadiens are struggling on many fronts this season and goaltending is not an exception.

Former Montreal Canadiens forward Lars Eller was traded from the Pittsburgh Penguins to the Washington Capitals on Tuesday.

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:

Tennessee won easily over Mississippi State. Indiana and BYU won nail-biters. So why did they jump over the Vols? We asked the CFP committee chair.

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

Fadel Zeidan
Nov 18, 2015; 35:15307-15325
BehavioralSystemsCognitive

Jennifer L. Zamanian
May 2, 2012; 32:6391-6410
Neurobiology of Disease

Emerging research in nonhuman animals implicates cerebellar projections to the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in appetitive behaviors, but these circuits have not been characterized in humans. Here, we mapped cerebello-VTA white matter connectivity in a cohort of men and women using probabilistic tractography on diffusion imaging data from the Human Connectome Project. We uncovered the topographical organization of these connections by separately tracking from parcels of cerebellar lobule VI, crus I/II, vermis, paravermis, and cerebrocerebellum. Results revealed that connections between the cerebellum and VTA predominantly originate in the right cerebellar hemisphere, interposed nucleus, and paravermal cortex and terminate mostly ipsilaterally. Paravermal crus I sends the most connections to the VTA compared with other lobules. We discovered a mediolateral gradient of connectivity, such that the medial cerebellum has the highest connectivity with the VTA. Individual differences in microstructure were associated with measures of negative affect and social functioning. By splitting the tracts into quarters, we found that the socioaffective effects were driven by the third quarter of the tract, corresponding to the point at which the fibers leave the deep nuclei. Taken together, we produced detailed maps of cerebello-VTA structural connectivity for the first time in humans and established their relevance for trait differences in socioaffective regulation.

GABAergic inhibitory interneurons comprise many subtypes that differ in their molecular, anatomical, and functional properties. In mouse visual cortex, they also differ in their modulation with an animal’s behavioral state, and this state modulation can be predicted from the first principal component (PC) of the gene expression matrix. Here, we ask whether this link between transcriptome and state-dependent processing generalizes across species. To this end, we analysed seven single-cell and single-nucleus RNA sequencing datasets from mouse, human, songbird, and turtle forebrains. Despite homology at the level of cell types, we found clear differences between transcriptomic PCs, with greater dissimilarities between evolutionarily distant species. These dissimilarities arise from two factors: divergence in gene expression within homologous cell types and divergence in cell-type abundance. We also compare the expression of cholinergic receptors, which are thought to causally link transcriptome and state modulation. Several cholinergic receptors predictive of state modulation in mouse interneurons are differentially expressed between species. Circuit modelling and mathematical analyses suggest conditions under which these expression differences could translate into functional differences.

Estimating the direction of functional connectivity (FC) can help further elucidate complex brain function. However, the estimation of directed FC at the voxel level in fMRI data, and evaluating its performance, has yet to be done. We therefore developed a novel directed seed-based connectivity analysis (SCA) method based on normalized pairwise Granger causality that provides greater detail and accuracy over ROI-based methods. We evaluated its performance against 145 cortical retrograde tracer injections in male and female marmosets that were used as ground truth cellular connectivity on a voxel-by-voxel basis. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was calculated for each injection, and we achieved area under the ROC curve of 0.95 for undirected and 0.942 for directed SCA in the case of high cell count threshold. This indicates that SCA can reliably estimate the strong cellular connections between voxels in fMRI data. We then used our directed SCA method to analyze the human default mode network (DMN) and found that dlPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and temporal lobe were separated from other DMN regions, forming part of the language-network that works together with the core DMN regions. We also found that the cerebellum (Crus I-II) was strongly targeted by the posterior parietal cortices and dlPFC, but reciprocal connections were not observed. Thus, the cerebellum may not be a part of, but instead a target of, the DMN and language-network. Summarily, our novel directed SCA method, visualized with a new functional flat mapping technique, opens a new paradigm for whole-brain functional analysis.

New York- FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva and the President of the UN Security Council (UNSC), Ambassador Ismael Gaspar Martins, have concurred upon the importance of using FAO’s regular [...]

The Director-General addressed the members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) on Tuesday in what was FAO’s first appearance before the principal UN body on global peace and security affairs.

Organized [...]

FAO is pleased to announce the release of the Global Plan of Action for the Conservation, Sustainable Use and Development of Aquatic Genetic Resources for Food [...]

26 October 2022, 09.00-16.00 (CEST)

Water is a fundamental resource enabling the production of over 95% of food on land as well the progress of all sustainable development goals [...]

Read the series on how FAO [...]

A large portion of Indiana's economy relies on an invaluable crop: corn. Popcorn plants like Pop Weaver have perfected the production of our favorite movie snack down to a science.

Selected by Reza for our special issue, this up-and-coming photographer discusses her work