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Machine Learning Helps Robot Swarms Coordinate
Engineers at Caltech have designed a new data-driven method to control the movement of multiple robots through cluttered, unmapped spaces, so they do not run into one another. Multi-robot motion coordination is a fundamental robotics problem with wide-ranging applications that range from urban search and rescue to the control of fleets of self-driving cars […]
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“Where are My Keys?” and Other Memory-Based Choices Probed in the Brain
Most of us know that feeling of trying to retrieve a memory that does not come right away – an actor’s name, a phone number, etc. While memory retrieval has been the subject of countless animal studies and other neuroimaging work in humans, exactly how the process works—and how we make decisions based on memories—has […]
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How Young Embryos Conduct Quality Control
The first few days of embryonic development are a critical point for determining the failure or success of a pregnancy. Because relatively few cells make up the embryo during this period, the health of each cell is vital to the health of the overall embryo. But often, these young cells have chromosomal aneuploidies—meaning, there are […]
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2020 TCCI Summer Newsletter
We hope this finds you safe and well. To say the last few months have been challenging is, of course, an understatement. Not only with the pandemic turning the world upside
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The Neuroscience of Stock Markets
Can technology borrowed from biological studies reveal the ways in which gender and other factors influence how humans choose? Caltech neuroeconomist Colin Camerer takes us behind the scenes, describing how he gains a deeper understanding of decision-making behaviors by looking inside the brain as choices are made. Colin Camerer is the Robert Kirby Professor […]
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Faces, Bodies, Spiders, and Radios: How the Brain Represents Visual Objects
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 […]
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Social Science in the Time of COVID: A Conversation with Ralph Adolphs
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, […]
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Can Patients in a Vegetative State Understand Language?
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 […]
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New Insights into Early Embryonic Development
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 […]
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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 […]