Persuasion via Performance: Toward a Handbook for Youth to Develop Content that Promotes HPV Vaccination.

Slightly over half of American teens are fully vaccinated against the human papillomavirus, or HPV. The vaccine is protective against 90% of cancers caused by HPV, including cancers of the vagina, vulva, and cervix in women, the penis in men, and cancers of the throat and anus in both men and women. While HPV vaccination rates are on the rise, rural areas lag significantly behind. There are several reasons why, and there are multiple strategies that can increase vaccination rates. This article discusses the process of creating a writer's handbook to enable youth writers and producers to create provaccination, short-form dramatic stories in podcast format, and to distribute and promote them via social media to their peers. The objective is to prompt students to get their HPV vaccination. The article concludes with examples that will be part of this handbook.

Cell-type-specific cholinergic control of granular retrosplenial cortex with implications for angular velocity coding across brain states.

Cholinergic receptor activation enables the persistent firing of cortical pyramidal neurons, providing a key cellular basis for theories of spatial navigation involving working memory, path integration, and head direction encoding. The granular retrosplenial cortex (RSG) is important for spatially-guided behaviors, but how acetylcholine impacts RSG neurons is unknown. Here, we show that a transcriptomically, morphologically, and biophysically distinct RSG cell-type - the low-rheobase (LR) neuron - has a very distinct expression profile of cholinergic muscarinic receptors compared to all other neighboring excitatory neuronal subtypes. LR neurons do not fire persistently in response to cholinergic agonists, in stark contrast to all other principal neuronal subtypes examined within the RSG and across midline cortex. This lack of persistence allows LR neuron models to rapidly compute angular head velocity (AHV), independent of cholinergic changes seen during navigation. Thus, LR neurons can consistently compute AHV across brain states, highlighting the specialized RSG neural codes supporting navigation.

Running speed and REM sleep control two distinct modes of rapid interhemispheric communication.

Rhythmic gamma-band communication within and across cortical hemispheres is critical for optimal perception, navigation, and memory. Here, using multisite recordings in both rats and mice, we show that even faster ∼140 Hz rhythms are robustly anti-phase across cortical hemispheres, visually resembling splines, the interlocking teeth on mechanical gears. Splines are strongest in superficial granular retrosplenial cortex, a region important for spatial navigation and memory. Spline-frequency interhemispheric communication becomes more coherent and more precisely anti-phase at faster running speeds. Anti-phase splines also demarcate high-activity frames during REM sleep. While splines and associated neuronal spiking are anti-phase across retrosplenial hemispheres during navigation and REM sleep, gamma-rhythmic interhemispheric communication is precisely in-phase. Gamma and splines occur at distinct points of a theta cycle and thus highlight the ability of interhemispheric cortical communication to rapidly switch between in-phase (gamma) and anti-phase (spline) modes within individual theta cycles during both navigation and REM sleep.

Hyperexcitable Neurons Enable Precise and Persistent Information Encoding in the Superficial Retrosplenial Cortex.

The retrosplenial cortex (RSC) is essential for memory and navigation, but the neural codes underlying these functions remain largely unknown. Here, we show that the most prominent cell type in layers 2/3 (L2/3) of the mouse granular RSC is a hyperexcitable, small pyramidal cell. These cells have a low rheobase (LR), high input resistance, lack of spike frequency adaptation, and spike widths intermediate to those of neighboring fast-spiking (FS) inhibitory neurons and regular-spiking (RS) excitatory neurons. LR cells are excitatory but rarely synapse onto neighboring neurons. Instead, L2/3 is a feedforward, not feedback, inhibition-dominated network with dense connectivity between FS cells and from FS to LR neurons. Biophysical models of LR but not RS cells precisely and continuously encode sustained input from afferent postsubicular head-direction cells. Thus, the distinct intrinsic properties of LR neurons can support both the precision and persistence necessary to encode information over multiple timescales in the RSC.

Ripple While You Walk, and You May Get Lost: Pathological High-Frequency Activity Can Alter Spatial Navigation Circuits.

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