Before the days of rote texting and email, if you wanted to communicate with a friend you might have written a physical letter. Similarly, the individual cells in our bodies communicate with each other by sending tailored “letters”—not with paper and pen, but in the form of proteins called ligands.   Researchers in the laboratory […]

For years, Caltech’s Mikhail Shapiro, a TCCI®-affiliated faculty member, has been working to extend ultrasound imaging into the microscopic realm. Now, with a new breakthrough based on genetic engineering, he is making it possible for researchers to use ultrasound to watch enzymes at work within cells.   In a new paper appearing in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, Shapiro and […]

It might seem as though humans have little in common with the lowly yeast cell. Humans have hair, skin, muscles, and bones, among other attributes. Yeast have, well, none of those things.   But besides their obvious differences, yeast and humans, and much of life for that matter, have a great deal in common. One […]

Engineers at Caltech have designed a new data-driven method to control the movement of multiple robots through cluttered, unmapped spaces, so they do not run into one another.   Multi-robot motion coordination is a fundamental robotics problem with wide-ranging applications that range from urban search and rescue to the control of fleets of self-driving cars […]

Most of us know that feeling of trying to retrieve a memory that does not come right away – an actor’s name, a phone number, etc.  While memory retrieval has been the subject of countless animal studies and other neuroimaging work in humans, exactly how the process works—and how we make decisions based on memories—has […]

The first few days of embryonic development are a critical point for determining the failure or success of a pregnancy. Because relatively few cells make up the embryo during this period, the health of each cell is vital to the health of the overall embryo. But often, these young cells have chromosomal aneuploidies—meaning, there are […]

When Plato set out to define what made a human a human, he settled on two primary characteristics: We do not have feathers, and we are bipedal (walking upright on two legs). Plato’s reduction of an object to its fundamental characteristics is an example of a technique known as principal component analysis. Now, Caltech researchers have […]

Ralph Adolphs, Caltech’s Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology, usually conducts research on human volunteers at the Caltech Brain Imaging Center (which he also directs) to try to understand how the fundamental biology of the brain, as revealed through neural activity, produces the breadth of human feelings, abilities, and these social behaviors. But now, […]