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 […]

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 […]