Category: Research News

  • Seeing through opaque media

    Seeing through opaque media

    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 […]

  • New Ultrafast Camera Takes 70 Trillion Pictures Per Second

    New Ultrafast Camera Takes 70 Trillion Pictures Per Second

    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 […]

  • Understanding Congenital Heart Defects, One Chicken at a Time

    Understanding Congenital Heart Defects, One Chicken at a Time

    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 […]

  • High-Throughput Method Speeds Discovery of Improved Vectors For Gene Delivery To Diverse Brain Cell Types

    High-Throughput Method Speeds Discovery of Improved Vectors For Gene Delivery To Diverse Brain Cell Types

    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 […]

  • An Invisible Threat: Fear and Anxiety in the Era of the Coronavirus

    An Invisible Threat: Fear and Anxiety in the Era of the Coronavirus

    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, […]

  • Watch and Learn: Study Shows How Brain Gains Knowledge Through Observation

    Watch and Learn: Study Shows How Brain Gains Knowledge Through Observation

    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, […]

  • Mapping Bacterial Neighborhoods in the Gut

    Mapping Bacterial Neighborhoods in the Gut

    The microscopic populations of bacteria in our intestines are, in some ways, just like us: They live in communities, eat, work, reproduce, and eventually die. Some live in harmony with our bodies but others don’t, putting us at increased risk for a variety of diseases. Now, Caltech researchers in the laboratory of Sarkis Mazmanian, Luis B. […]

  • Biomarker for Parkinson’s Disease May Originate in the Gut

    Biomarker for Parkinson’s Disease May Originate in the Gut

    Researchers in the lab of Viviana Gradinaru, professor of neuroscience and biological engineering, Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator and director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience at the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech, may have discovered a link between neurons in the gut and Parkinson’s Disease, a debilitating neurodegenerative disorder, impairing […]

  • Protein Signposts Guide Formation of Neural Connections

    Protein Signposts Guide Formation of Neural Connections

    A major goal of neuroscience is understanding how all of the brain’s neurons know how to connect to each other to achieve optimum function. Scientists often study the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster because their brains are “hardwired” (meaning nearly identical). Now, Caltech researchers have determined how part of the fly’s visual system forms, an important piece in […]

  • How Interacting with Females Increases Aggression in Male Fruit Flies

    How Interacting with Females Increases Aggression in Male Fruit Flies

    Caltech researchers have made progress toward understanding the neurological basis of the heightened aggression that male Drosophila show toward one another after recent encounters with females. Their research shows that your brain takes recent experiences into account when coordinating your responses to external stimuli.   The study was conducted in the laboratory of David Anderson, Seymour Benzer Professor of […]