Anthills…a mound of crumbly dirt to many but look closely and you’ll discover tunnels diving downward, branching and leading to specialized chambers that serve as home for the colony’s queen, as nurseries for its young, as farms for fungus cultivated for food, and as dumps for its trash. These are underground cities, some of them home […]

What do you do at different times in the day? What do you eat? How do you interact with your neighbors? These are some of the questions that biologists would love to ask communities of microbes, from those that live in extreme environments deep in the ocean to those that cause chronic infections in humans. […]

Professor Yu Jintai, a researcher from the Neurology Department of Fudan University-affiliated Huashan Hospital and a Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute Investigator, and his team revealed for the first time a correlation between longevity and controllable environmental factors. Their findings were published July 20 2021 in the medical journal, BMC Medicine.   In his research, […]

TCCI® investigator, Professor Yuan Tifei from Shanghai Mental Health Center and his team recently worked with Professor Luo Wenbo’s team from Liaoning Normal University on research, published in Molecular Psychiatry, that revealed key findings related to the neurological mechanisms behind drug cravings.   Previous studies both in laboratory animals and humans have reported that abstinence induces incubation […]

New research conducted primarily in the laboratory of Sarkis Mazmanian, Luis B. and Nelly Soux Professor of Microbiology, HRMI Investigator and affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech, shows that germs living inside our bodies could be affecting our ability to socialize and make friends…at least for mice. […]

Professor Zhili Huang, a researcher from Fudan University, president of the Chinese Sleep Research Society and a Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute (TCCI®) Investigator, recently published a paper titled “Neural Circuitry Underlying REM Sleep: A review of the literature and current concepts” in the journal Progress in Neurobiology.   In the paper, Professor Huang discussed […]

A new Caltech study, appearing in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, shows that a simple computer program can accurately predict which style of paintings a person will like. Using Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk to enlist more than 1,500 volunteers to rate paintings in the genres of impressionism, cubism, abstract, and color field, the volunteers’ […]

A Caltech professor, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Southern California, has demonstrated for the first time a new technology for imaging the human brain using laser light and ultrasonic sound waves.   The technology, known as photoacoustic computerized tomography, or PACT, has been developed by Lihong Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering […]

Professor Yu Jintai, a researcher from the Neurology Department of Fudan University-affiliated Huashan Hospital and Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute (TCCI®) Investigator, revealed an association between blood pressure and the risk of cognitive impairment and dementia through a large-scale, five-year cohort study in partnership with a research team led by Professor Tan Lan from the […]

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 […]