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Caltech Announces Diversity and Inclusion Award Recipients
The Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech announced the recipients of this year’s Chen Institute Diversity and Inclusion Awards. These awards, for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in neuroscience at Caltech, are intended to recognize active individuals for the uncompensated time and effort they are dedicating to achieve diversity and inclusion at […]
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Hungry Fruit Flies are Extreme Ultramarathon Fliers
In 2005, an ultramarathon runner ran continuously 560 kilometers (350 miles) in 80 hours, without sleeping or stopping. This distance was roughly 324,000 times the runner’s body length. Caltech scientists have discovered that fruit flies can fly up to 15 kilometers (9 miles) in a single journey—6 million times their body length, or the equivalent […]
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Reading Minds with Ultrasound: A Less-Invasive Technique to Decode the Brain’s Intentions
Mapping neural activity to corresponding behaviors is a major goal for neuroscientists developing brain–machine interfaces (BMIs): devices that read and interpret brain activity and transmit instructions to a computer or machine. Though this may seem like science fiction, existing BMIs can, for example, connect a paralyzed person with a robotic arm; the device interprets the […]
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2021 TCCI Spring Newsletter
Spring is always a time for renewal but this year perhaps more so than ever before as a new wave of optimism, fueled by the increasing pace of vaccinations, sweeps
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“What Is a Short Squeeze?” and Other Pressing Stock Market Questions Answered
Recently, the video game retailer GameStop and other struggling companies were part of an unprecedented movement in financial history in which armchair traders wildly disrupted the stock market. The traders’ meddling was possible thanks to online forums like those on Reddit and trading platforms such as Robinhood that let people buy and sell stocks for […]
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The Golden Age of Social Science
Some of the most challenging problems facing our world, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, require not just one field of expertise but a unified interdisciplinary approach. Or so explains a team of social scientists at Caltech in a new report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Likening the report to […]
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Caltech Dedicates a Neuroscience Research Hub
Neuroscience has a new home. On Friday, January 29, Caltech hosted a virtual dedication for The Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Neuroscience Research Building (CNRB), the newest addition to campus. Although the pandemic prevented the community from gathering in person to celebrate the opening of the new building, more than 850 Caltech leaders, researchers, students, alumni, […]
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“Nuclear Physics”: Imaging into the Heart of a Cell
Nestled deep in the nucleus of each of your cells is what seems like a magic trick: Six feet of DNA is packaged into a tiny space 50 times smaller than the width of a human hair. Like a long, thin string of genetic spaghetti, this DNA blueprint for your whole body is folded and […]
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What is Personality?
In a new paper, titled “Personality beyond taxonomy,” published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, Caltech researchers from the disciplines of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy discuss the long-standing question: What is personality? Whereas most studies measure personality in various ways, they are often ambiguous about what personality really is: Is it in the behaviors themselves […]
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Proving a Link Between Chronic Alcohol Exposure and Impaired Inhibitory Function
The GABAB receptor (GABABR) agonist baclofen has been used to treat alcohol and several other substance use disorders yet how exactly it works remains unclear. Professor Tifei Yuan, a Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Translational Research project lead and Principal Investigator at Shanghai Mental Health Center recently published an online paper titled, “Reduced Motor […]