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, […]

Professor Mao Ying, Director of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Translational Research, and other members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neurology published the paper ” Assessing the Depth of Language Processing in Patients with Disorders of Consciousness ” online in Nature Neuroscience on May 25.   The study used high-density EEG […]

Caltech researchers have new insights into the embryo’s architecture and the structures that enable proper development at a very early stage. The research was done in the laboratory of Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, Bren Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering and affiliated faculty member with the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience. A paper describing the study appears in the […]

Caltech researchers have developed a technique combining fluorescence and ultrasound to peer through opaque media, such as biological tissue. Changhuei Yang, Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Medical Engineering, and senior author of a paper about the technique says they hope this method will one day be deployed to extend the operating […]

A new camera developed in the lab of Lihong Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering in the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering, is capable of taking as many as 70 trillion frames per second. That is fast enough to see waves of light traveling and the fluorescent decay of […]

Approximately 10 percent of infants are born with a congenital heart defect, with one of the most common being persistent truncus arteriosus—a hole in the heart. New research conducted in the Caltech laboratory of Marianne Bronner, Albert Billings Ruddock Professor of Biology and director of the Beckman Institute uses chicken embryos as a model organism, to discover the […]

Viruses are nature’s Trojan horses: They gain entrance to cells, smuggle in their genetic material, and use the cell’s own machinery to replicate. For decades, scientists have studied how to repurpose these invaders to deliver therapeutics for treating disease and tools for studying cells. Researchers in the lab of Viviana Gradinaru, professor of neuroscience and […]

Dean Mobbs, assistant professor of cognitive neuroscience and Chen Scholar at Caltech explains the brain circuitry that is causing many of us to feel heightened anxiety during the coronavirus pandemic. He calls the coronavirus an “invisible threat” and says that it causes us to seek out information on media sites about how to prevent it, […]

It has long been the belief that there are two types of observational learning: imitation and emulation. Research led by Caroline Charpentier, a postdoctoral scholar in neuroscience at Caltech, now shows how the brain chooses between the two neural systems responsible for each of these kinds of learning. The study, which appears in the journal Neuron, […]