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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

A new study from Caltech compares brain scans of humans playing classic Atari video games to sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) networks that have been trained to play the same games. The research was led by graduate student Logan Cross, in the laboratory of TCCI®-affiliated Professor of Psychology John O’Doherty and found that the activity in […]

Mounting behavior, that awkward thrusting motion dogs sometimes do against your leg, is usually associated with sexual arousal in animals, but this is not always the case. New research by Caltech neuroscientists that explores the motivations behind mounting behavior in mice finds that sometimes there is a thin line between love and hate (or anger) […]