News

October 30, 2009 - Researchers at Caltech have shown that a highly specific intrabody (an antibody fragment that works against a target inside a cell) is capable of stalling the development of Huntington's disease in a variety of mouse models. "Gene therapy in these models successfully attenuated the symptoms of Huntington's disease and increased life span," notes Paul Patterson, the Anne P. and Benjamin F. Biaggini Professor of Biological Sciences.

September 29, 2009 - Researchers at Caltech have proposed a novel model that differs from a widely held hypothesis about the mechanisms by which developing animals pattern their tissues and structures. Cells in a developing animal require information about their position with respect to other cells so that they can adopt specific patterns of gene expression and function correctly. The most accepted paradigm is that this positional information comes in the form of chemical signals called morphogens; morphogens are differentially distributed across the developing field, with cells acquiring the information about their position relative to their neighbors by "measuring" and interpreting the local concentrations of the morphogen.

August 18, 2009 - A team of scientists from Caltech have pinpointed two groups of neurons in fruit fly brains that have the ability to sense and manipulate the fly's fat stores in much the same way as do neurons in the mammalian brain. The existence of this sort of control over fat deposition and metabolic rates makes the flies a potentially useful model for the study of human obesity, the researchers note. Their findings were published in the August 13 issue of the journal Neuron.

August 11, 2009 - Researchers at Caltech and their colleagues in 30 laboratories worldwide have released a new set of standards for graphically representing biological information—the biology equivalent of the circuit diagram in electronics. This visual language should make it easier to exchange complex information, so that biological models are depicted more accurately, consistently, and in a more readily understandable way. The new standard, called the Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN), was published in the August 8 issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology.

July 29, 2009 - Using a combination of theoretical modeling, energy calculations, and field observations, researchers from Caltech have for the first time described a mechanism that explains how some of the ocean's tiniest swimming animals can have a huge impact on large-scale ocean mixing. Their findings are being published in the July 30 issue of the journal Nature.

"We've been studying swimming animals for quite some time," says John Dabiri, a Caltech assistant professor of aeronautics and bioengineering who, along with Caltech graduate student Kakani Katija, discovered the new mechanism. "The perspective we usually take is that of how the ocean—by its currents, temperature, and chemistry—is affecting the animals. But there have been increasing suggestions that the inverse is also important—how the animals themselves, via swimming, might impact the ocean environment."

July 20, 2009 - How evolution acts to bridge the chasm between two discrete physiological states is a question that's long puzzled scientists. Most evolutionary changes, after all, happen in tiny increments: an elephant grows a little larger, a giraffe's neck a little longer. If those tiny changes prove advantageous, there's a better chance of passing them to the next generation, which might then add its own mutations. And so on, and so on, until you have a huge pachyderm or the characteristic stretched neck of a giraffe. But when it comes to traits like the number of wings on an insect, or limbs on a primate, there is no middle ground. How are these sorts of large evolutionary leaps made? According to a team led by Caltech scientists, in close collaboration with Patrick Piggot and colleagues from the Temple University School of Medicine, such changes may at least sometimes be the result of random fluctuations, or noise (nongenetic variations), working alongside a phenomenon known as partial penetrance.

June 26, 2009 - Caltech researchers studying the nervous control of nematode mating behavior have produced video footage of a male worm preparing to mate with a hermaphrodite. Allyson Whittaker, a senior research fellow in biology, and Paul Sternberg, the Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Biology, investigated the role of the excitatory neurotransmitter acetylcholine in regulating tail muscles to achieve an exploratory embrace. The video shows an intimate moment between two nematodes of the species Caenorhabditis elegans.

June 17, 2009 - Bacteria are mostly known for making you sick—causing deadly diseases such as pneumonia, syphilis, cholera, tuberculosis, and meningitis. But not all microbes are malicious. In fact, your bowels bustle with about a hundred trillion bacteria—that's 10 times more microorganisms than you have cells in your body. In a recent article in Engineering & Science magazine, author Marcus Woo explains that these bugs aren't just harmless; they may be crucial for your health. Click here to learn more.

June 11, 2009 - The twirling seeds of maple trees spin like miniature helicopters as they fall to the ground. Because the seeds descend slowly as they swirl, they're carried aloft by the wind and dispersed over great distances. Just how the seeds manage to fall so slowly, however, has mystified scientists. In research published in the June 12 Science, researchers from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and Caltech describe the aerodynamic secret of the enchanting swirling seeds.

May 29, 2009 - Theta oscillations are a type of prominent brain rhythm that orchestrates neuronal activity in the hippocampus, a brain area critical for the formation of new memories. For several decades these oscillations were believed to be "in sync" across the hippocampus, timing the firing of neurons like a sort of central pacemaker. A new study conducted by researchers at Caltech argues that this long-held assumption needs to be revised. In a paper published in this week's issue of the journal Nature, the researchers showed that instead of being in sync, theta oscillations actually sweep along the length of the hippocampus as traveling waves.

May 19, 2009 - You can tell without looking whether you've been stuck by a pin or burnt by a match. But how? In research that overturns conventional wisdom, a team of scientists from Caltech and the University of California, San Francisco, have shown that this sensory discrimination begins in the skin at the very earliest stages of neuronal information processing, with different populations of sensory neurons—called nociceptors—responding to different kinds of painful stimuli. Their findings were published this week in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

May 8, 2009 - Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866–1945) and his students were members of the heroic generation of American biologists—those who raised biology in the United States to a position second to none in the world. Morgan's school of genetics and the Drosophila drawings of his longtime assistant, Edith M. Wallace, are featured this month in the Caltech Archives' current website news, as Caltech observes Darwin's bicentennial, at http://archives.caltech.edu.

May 8, 2009 - The National Academies Keck Futures Initiative recently announced the recipients of the 2008 Futures grants, which are awarded to support interdisciplinary research on complex systems including ecosystems, financial markets, communication networks, and biology. Among the recipients are Nate Lewis and Tuan Duong, who will receive a grant of $50,000 to study the use of an "electronic nose" for breath-based detection of lung cancer.

Lewis, Caltech's Argyos Professor and professor of chemistry, and Duong, a JPL researcher who serves as president and CEO of Adaptive Computation LLC, will examine whether a low-power, portable array of vapor sensors can detect and identify mixtures of volatile, organic, breath-based biomarkers that have been identified as diagnostic signatures suitable for screening for early-stage lung cancer.

April 27, 2009 - Current concerns over the swine flu outbreak in North America mirror those that arose three years ago regarding bird flu in Asia. Although the two strains of the virus are not the same, both are created when a strain of animal flu mutates into a variety that can infect humans and, as seems to be the case with swine flu, transmitted from person to person. What is it about the biology of influenza that makes it so prone to mutation, how do these new strains of flu arise, and what are some of the public health implications? In a 2007 article in Caltech News, Caltech virologist and president elect of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Alice Huang discussed these issues in a wide-ranging interview on the topic of swine flu's close cousin, bird flu.

April 22, 2009 - Some 25 years after the AIDS epidemic spawned a worldwide search for an effective vaccine against the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), progress in the field seems to have effectively become stalled. The reason? According to new findings from a team of researchers from Caltech, it's at least partly due to the fact that our body's natural HIV antibodies simply don't have a long enough reach to effectively neutralize the viruses they are meant to target. "This study helps to clarify the obstacles that antibodies face in blocking infection," says Pamela Bjorkman, the Max Delbruck Professor of Biology at Caltech and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, "and will hopefully shed more light on why developing an effective vaccine for HIV has proven so elusive."

April 17, 2009 - Caltech's Lap Man Lee, Xiquan Cui, and Changhuei Yang, the developers of the "microscopic microscope", a lens-less, super-compact high-resolution microscope, small enough to fit on a finger tip, have used the device to obtain high-quality images of the water pathogen Giardia lamblia. "The Giardia images were surprisingly interesting because we can see the flagella in them, which I did not expect," says Yang. The work, published April 14 in the online-first version of the journal Biomedical Microdevices, is an important step toward cheap, in-the-field water-quality testing. Adds Yang, "This may one day lead to a compact device that you can dip into a river or a pool of water to determine if it is safe enough to drink. This can have applications in resource-poor environments."

April 8, 2009 - Scientists at Caltech have trained computers to automatically analyze aggression and courtship in fruit flies, opening the way for researchers to perform large-scale, high-throughput screens for genes that control these innate behaviors. The program allows computers to examine half an hour of video footage of pairs of interacting flies in what is almost real time; characterizing the behavior of a new line of flies "by hand" might take a biologist more than 100 hours. This work—led by Pietro Perona, the Allen E. Puckett Professor of Electrical Engineering at Caltech, and David J. Anderson, the Roger W. Sperry Professor of Biology at Caltech, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator—is detailed in the April issue of Nature Methods.

March 30, 2009 - Combining a compound known as a gallium corrole with a protein carrier results in a targeted cancer therapy that is able to detect and eliminate tumors in mice with seemingly fewer side effects than other breast-cancer treatments, says a team of researchers from Caltech, the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) and the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. A paper describing their work is highlighted in this week's issue of the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

March 23, 2009 - Researchers at Caltech and world-leading gene-synthesis company DNA2.0 have taken an important step toward the development of a cost-efficient process to extract sugars from cellulose—the world's most abundant organic material and cheapest form of solar-energy storage. Plant sugars are easily converted into a variety of renewable fuels such as ethanol or butanol. In a paper published this week in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Frances H. Arnold, the Dick and Barbara Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biochemistry at Caltech, and her colleagues report the construction of 15 new highly stable fungal enzyme catalysts that efficiently break down cellulose into sugars at high temperatures.

March 12, 2009 - Tiny, lightweight fruit flies need to know when it's windy out so they can steady themselves and avoid being knocked off their feet or blown off course. But how do they figure out that it's time to hunker down? According to a team led by Caltech scientists reporting in this week's issue of the journal Nature, the flies have evolved a specialized population of neurons in their antennae that let them know not only when the wind is blowing, but also the direction from which it is coming.

March 11, 2009 - Neuroscientists at Caltech have conducted the most comprehensive brain mapping to date of the cognitive abilities measured by the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS), the most widely used intelligence test in the world. The results offer new insight into how the various factors that comprise an "intelligence quotient" (IQ) score depend on particular regions of the brain. Neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs, Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and professor of biology at Caltech, Caltech postdoctoral scholar Jan Gläscher, and their colleagues compiled the maps using detailed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computerized tomography (CT) brain scans of 241 neurological patients recruited from the University of Iowa's extensive brain-lesion registry.

March 9, 2009 - For the tiny soil-dwelling nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, life is usually a situation of feast or famine. Researchers at Caltech have found that this worm has evolved a surprisingly optimistic genetic strategy to cope with these disparate conditions—one that could eventually point the way to new treatments for a host of human diseases caused by parasitic worms. As reported in a paper published in the February 26 issue of Science Express, Paul W. Sternberg, the Thomas Hunt Morgan Professor of Biology at Caltech and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, along with postdoctoral scholar L. Ryan Baugh, looked at the worms' genetic response to conditions of scarcity and plenty.

March 6, 2009 - Research!America has named David Baltimore, Caltech President Emeritus and Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Biology, the recipient of the 2009 Builders of Science Award. The nation's largest not-for-profit public education and advocacy alliance, Research!America recognized the Nobel laureate for his leadership as founder of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and as past president of Caltech. "In these positions he built the capabilities, reputations and resources of what are now widely acknowledged as two of the world's top research institutions."

Baltimore will be honored on March 24, at the 13th annual Research!America Advocacy Awards event at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium in Washington, DC.

For more information on the Advocacy Awards, click here.

February 26, 2009 - By listening in on the chatter between neurons in various parts of the brain, researchers from Caltech have taken steps toward fully understanding just how memories are formed, transferred, and ultimately stored in the brain—and how that process varies throughout the various stages of sleep. Their findings, published in the February 26 issue of the journal Neuron, may someday even help scientists understand why dreams are so difficult to remember.

February 3, 2009 - A quartet of studies by researchers at Caltech highlight a special feature on gene regulatory networks recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The collection of papers, "Gene Networks in Development and Evolution Special Feature, Sackler Colloquium," was coedited by Caltech's Eric H. Davidson, the Norman Chandler Professor of Cell Biology.

December 22, 2008 - The Ellison Medical Foundation (EMF) has awarded Senior Scholar Awards of nearly $1 million each to three Caltech researchers for exploratory projects in the molecular biology of aging processes and age-related diseases. The Institute's recipients are David Baltimore, Caltech President Emeritus and Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Biology; Jacqueline Barton, the Arthur and Marian Hanisch Memorial Professor and professor of chemistry; and Judith Campbell, professor of chemistry and biology. The brainchild of Laurence J. Ellison, Oracle cofounder and CEO, and Nobel Prize-winning biologist Joshua Lederberg, the EMF supports basic research that integrates molecular biology and the biomedicine of aging. Its Senior Scholar Awards fund exploratory work by acclaimed researchers, many new to the study of aging.

December 8, 2008 - Using novel imaging, labeling, and data-analysis techniques, scientists from Caltech have been able to visualize, for the first time, large numbers of cells moving en masse during some of the earliest stages of embryonic development. The findings not only provide insight into this stage of development—called gastrulation—but give a more general glimpse at how a living organism choreographs the motions of thousands of cells at one time. Previous research has been generally limited to imaging the movements of single cells. The work was published in the December 5 issue of the journal Science.

December 1, 2008 - Caltech Scientists have created images of the heart's muscular layer that show, for the first time, the connection between the configuration of those muscles and the way the human heart contracts. More precisely, they showed that the muscular band—which wraps around the inner chambers of the heart in a helix—is actually a sort of twisting highway along which each contraction of the heart travels. Their findings were published in the December issue of the American Physiological Society journal, Heart and Circulatory Physiology.

November 20, 2008 - Two prominent researchers from Caltech have been named among the country's 24 top leaders by U.S. News Media Group in association with the Center for Public Leadership (CPL) at Harvard Kennedy School. The 2008 edition of America's Best Leaders—available online at http://www.usnews.com/leaders and on newsstands Monday, November 24—includes honors for Caltech's David Baltimore and Fiona Harrison. According to U.S. News, the Best Leaders issue features "some of the country's most visionary individuals," highlighting those professionals "who continue to offer optimism and hope through their work."

November 18, 2008 - The bacterial cell wall that is the target of potent antibiotics such as penicillin is actually made up of a thin single layer of carbohydrate chains, linked together by peptides, which wrap around the bacterium like a belt around a person, according to research conducted by scientists at Caltech. This first-ever glimpse of the cell-wall structure in three dimensions was made possible by new high-tech microscopy techniques that enabled the scientists to visualize these biological structures at nanometer scales.

November 13, 2008 - A team of five Caltech undergraduates placed third in this year's international Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition at MIT. Eighty-five teams from around the world participated in the synthetic-biology research competition, and winners were determined based on online documentation, oral presentations, and poster presentations.

At the beginning of last summer, each team was given a kit of biological parts from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. They used these and new parts of their own design to build biological systems and operate them in living cells.

October 17, 2008 - Engineers from Caltech have created a "plug-and-play" synthetic RNA device—a sort of eminently customizable biological computer—that is capable of taking in and responding to more than one biological or environmental signal at a time. In the future, such devices could have a multitude of potential medical applications, including being used as sensors to sniff out tumor cells or determine when to turn modified genes on or off during cancer therapy. A synthetic RNA device is a biological device that uses engineered modular components made of RNA nucleotides to perform a specific function—for instance, to detect and respond to biochemical signals inside a cell or in its immediate environment.

October 13, 2008 - The transportation of antibodies from a mother to her newborn child is vital for the development of that child's nascent immune system. Those antibodies, donated by transfer across the placenta before birth or via breast milk after birth, help shape a baby's response to foreign pathogens and may influence the later occurrence of autoimmune diseases. Images from biologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have revealed for the first time the complicated process by which these antibodies are shuttled from mother's milk, through her baby's gut, and into the bloodstream, and offer new insight into the mammalian immune system.

September 3, 2008 - The advantage of using two eyes to see the world around us has long been associated solely with our capacity to see in three dimensions. Now, a new study by scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York and Caltech has uncovered a truly eye-opening advantage to binocular vision: the ability to see through things.

August 6, 2008 - Individuals with synesthesia, or cross-activated senses, perceive the world differently from others, with some perceiving numbers or letters as having colors or days of the week as possessing personalities. Now, Caltech's Melissa Saenz and Christof Koch have discovered a type of synesthesia in which individuals hear sounds, such as tapping, beeping, or whirring, when they see things move or flash. Saenz and Koch say auditory synesthesia, which had never been identified, may not be unusual but may simply represent an enhanced form of how the brain normally processes visual information. Their report about the phenomenon is published in the August 5 issue of Current Biology.

July 31, 2008 - Organisms ranging from humans to plants to the lowliest bacterium use molecules to communicate. Some chemicals trigger the various stages of an organism's development, and still others are used to attract members of the opposite sex. Caltech molecular geneticist Paul Sternberg and his colleagues have now found a rare kind of signaling molecule in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans that serves a dual purpose, working as both a population-control mechanism and a sexual attractant.

The discovery, published online July 23 in the journal Nature, could lead to new ways to control parasitic nematodes, which affect the health of more than a billion people and each year cause billions of dollars in crop damage.

July 18, 2008 - Viruses achieve their definition of success when they can thrive without killing their host. Now, biologists Pamela Bjorkman and Zhiru Yang of the California Institute of Technology have uncovered how one such virus, prevalent in humans, evolved over time to hide from the immune system. Understanding how Human Cytomegalovirus survives may help in the development of a vaccine, as well as in the fight against other viruses with similar evasive tactics.

July 15, 2008 - Some parents of children with autism evaluate facial expressions differently than the rest of us—and in a way that is strikingly similar to autistic patients themselves, according to new research by neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs of Caltech and psychiatrist Joe Piven at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

June 9, 2008 - Contrary to what one might imagine, the way in which each of us interacts with the world is not a simple matter of seeing (or touching, or smelling) and then reacting. Even the best baseball hitter eyeing a fastball does not swing at what he sees. The neurons and neural connections that make up our sensory systems are far too slow for this to work. "Everything we sense is a little bit in the past," says Caltech's Richard A. Andersen, who has now uncovered the trick the brain uses to get around this puzzling problem. Work by Andersen and his colleagues Grant Mulliken of MIT and Sam Musallam of McGill University, offers the first neural evidence that voluntary limb movements are guided by our brain's prediction of what will happen an instant into the future. "The brain is generating its own version of the world, a 'forward model,' which allows you to know where you actually are in real time. It takes the delays out of the system," Andersen says.

May 28, 2008 - Every three years, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) appoints the nation's most creative biomedical scientists as investigators, giving them millions of dollars to unfetter their ambitious research plans. This year, three of the 56 newly named HHMI investigators come from the California Institute of Technology. David Chan, Michael Elowitz, and Grant Jensen were each chosen for their potential to "bring new and innovative ways of thinking about biology to the HHMI community," says Thomas R. Cech, president of HHMI.

May 28, 2008 - A naturally occurring molecule made by symbiotic gut bacteria may offer a new type of treatment for inflammatory bowel disease, according to Caltech scientists. "Most people tend to think of bacteria as insidious organisms that only make us sick," says Caltech's Sarkis K. Mazmanian, whose laboratory examines the symbiotic relationship between "good" bacteria and their mammalian hosts. Instead, he says, "bacteria can be beneficial and actively promote health." The article is featured on the cover of the May 29 issue of the journal Nature.

May 19, 2008 - In a strategic game, the success of any player depends not just on his or her own actions, but on the behavior of every other player in the game. To be successful, players must not only pay attention to what other players do, but also how they are thinking. Understanding how the brain functions during this strategizing is at "the core of studies of adaptive social intelligence," says Caltech's John P. O'Doherty and the subject of a recent series of brain studies by O'Doherty and his colleagues that offer new insight into how the brain works in social situations.

May 15, 2008 - Studies of the brains of blind persons whose sight was partially restored later in life have produced a compelling example of the brain's ability to adapt to new circumstances and rewire and reconfigure itself. The research, conducted by Caltech postdoctoral researcher Melissa Saenz and Christof Koch, the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology and professor of computation and neural systems, shows that the part of the brain that processes visual information in normal individuals can be co-opted to respond to both visual and auditory information. That brain reorganization persists even if the blind subjects later regain their vision—for example, through technologies such as corneal stem-cell transplants, retinal prosthetics, and gene therapy.

May 15, 2008 - Have you ever noticed that signposts and trees on the side of the road seem to whoosh by faster right as you drive past them, or that a door frame seems to curve outward as you approach it? These are just two examples of real-life movements that underlie more than 50 types of illusions, now systematically organized and explained by scientists at the California Institute of Technology. The systematization also lends a glimpse into how illusions are not simply tricks your brain likes to play on you; they are manifestations of how the visual system evolved to keep up with real-life motion. These illusions now fall into 28 predictable categories defined by Mark Changizi during a fellowship in the Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology at Caltech and appearing May 28 in the journal Cognitive Science.

May 8, 2008 - In the biblical story in which two women bring a baby to King Solomon, both claiming to be the mother, he suggests dividing the child so that each woman can have half. Solomon's proposed solution, meant to reveal the real mother, also illustrates an issue central to economics and moral philosophy: how to distribute goods fairly. Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology have discovered that reason struggles with emotion to find equitable solutions, and have pinpointed the region of the brain where this takes place. The concept of fairness, they found, is processed in the insular cortex, or insula, which is also the seat of emotional reactions. "The fact that the brain has such a robust response to unfairness suggests that sensing unfairness is a basic evolved capacity," notes Steven Quartz, an associate professor of philosophy at Caltech and author of the study.

May 5, 2008 - Scientists at Caltech have produced the first complete description of the complex network of genes that create a particular type of cell in an organism. Using the complete sequence of the California purple sea urchin and other techniques to determine the regulatory genes expressed at each point during embryonic development and how their interrelationships influence the architecture of the sea urchin's skeletal system, Eric Davidson and his colleagues created a complete blueprint for the development of a lineage of cells whose particular function is to build a series of biomineral skeletal rods inside the embryo. The work appears in the April 22 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

April 21, 2008 - As conventional means fail to conquer Africa's deadliest diseases—HIV and malaria—researchers are starting to look outside the box. One solution might be Nobelist David Baltimore's novel approach to combating HIV through gene therapy. He will give the headlining lecture at the Symposium on African Health at Caltech May 3 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in Ramo Auditorium on the Caltech campus in Pasadena. Admission is free.

April 16, 2008 - Your brain gets a better workout when you change your routine, say scientists at the California Institute of Technology who have pinpointed one particular circuit that activates your ability to execute a decision. This finding may help drive research in neural prosthetics and in how unhealthy decisions are made. "How you decide to do things is fascinating, and not well understood," says Richard Andersen, Caltech's Boswell Professor of Neuroscience and senior researcher in the study. "We're looking at how different areas interact during the process&mdash'how you make a decision to plan a movement."

April 14, 2008 - In the brain, as in sports, sex, and life, timing—and teamwork—are everything. Such is the message of a series of studies by Caltech's Thanos Siapas and his postdoctoral researcher Evgueniy Lubenov that offer insight into the processes by which memories are stored in the brain and that may someday guide the development of new therapies to prevent epileptic seizures. Using computer models of neuronal circuits and experiments on live rats, the scientists are revealing the curious mechanism by which the brain spontaneously tips itself toward a state balanced between order and chaos. The driving factor in the brain's self-regulation, they say, is the timing of neural pulses.

April 1, 2008 - Seeing a burgeoning new research field at the interface of biology and engineering, the Benjamin M. Rosen Family Foundation of New York has donated $18 million to Caltech to establish the Donna and Benjamin M. Rosen Bioengineering Center.

March 25, 2008 - Even flies like video games—and it's not just child's play, say Caltech scientists. With the help of a unique bug-sized flight simulator, Michael Dickinson and his postdocs Gaby Maimon and Andrew Straw are deciphering the secrets of behavior and decision making in the fruit fly brain, and, ultimately, in our own.

February 13, 2008 - The eyes may be the windows to the soul, but the simple pupil—the circular opening at the center of the eye that contracts and dilates to regulate the amount of light the eye receives—offers a remarkable portal to the inner workings of the brain. Such is the conclusion of Caltech neurobiologist Christof Koch and his colleagues, who have found that changes in pupil diameter correspond to the moment when a simple decision is made.

December 5, 2007 - Studies of the snap judgments we often make about people are shedding new light not only on social behavior, but also on drug abuse, gambling addiction, and other disorders in which our ability to make decisions is impaired, say scientists at the California Institute of Technology.

November 30, 2007 - Seymour Benzer, a founder of the field of modern genetics, died from a stroke on Friday, November 30 at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena. He was 86. An emeritus professor at the California Institute of Technology, Benzer's lasting impact on modern-day genetics can be seen in continuing work whose foundations he helped lay. Studies in gene mutations and regulation and in the genetic underpinnings of behavior can all be attributed to his groundbreaking research.

November 29, 2007 - Research institutions across Southern California have joined forces to advance stem cell research by establishing the Southern California Stem Cell Scientific Collaboration (SC3). Members of the collaboration include the California Institute of Technology; University of Southern California; Childrens Hospital Los Angeles; City of Hope; the University of California, Santa Barbara; and the House Ear Institute.

November 14, 2007 - Caltech scientists have deciphered the activity of an area of the brain that could one day prove vital in the development of neural prostheses—within-the-brain implants that would translate thought into movement in paralyzed patients. The results of this study were published as the featured article in the November 8 issue of Neuron.

October 17, 2007 - A Caltech neurobiology lab is studying "preference decisions"--the red necktie or the blue one? Coke or Pepsi?--and it turns out that the body may be as influential as the brain.

October 11, 2007 - Richard A. Andersen, the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, has been elected as one of 65 new members of the Institute of Medicine. Andersen studies the neurobiological underpinnings of brain processes, including the senses of sight, hearing, balance, and touch, and the neural mechanisms of action and is a pioneer in the development of implanted neural prosthetic devices that would serve as an interface between severely paralyzed individuals' brain signals and their artificial limbs—allowing thoughts to control movement.

October 11, 2007 - Children born with a rare genetic disorder that can lead to debilitating and irreversible brain injury may find protection with the aid of brain imaging and a modified diet. Caltech researchers joined scientists at Penn State College of Medicine to study the signs of glutaric aciduria type I (GA-I), a disorder arising from a gene defect that blocks a child's ability to break down the amino acids lysine and tryptophan. Although rare in the general population, 1 in 400 Amish children are born with GA-I, and despite current treatments, it can lead to severe brain damage, painful crippling, or death in 25 to 30 percent of children who have it.

October 2, 2007 - A team of Caltech researchers found an unexpected link connecting schizophrenia and autism to the importance of covering your mouth whenever you sneeze. Recent studies suggest that if a woman suffers even one respiratory infection during her second trimester, her offspring's risk of schizophrenia rises by three to seven times. Schizophrenia and autism have a strong (though elusive) genetic component. Susceptibility to these disorders is increased by something that occurs to mother or fetus during a bout with the flu. The researchers isolated a protein that plays a pivotal role in that dire chain of events. A paper containing their results, "Maternal immune activation alters fetal brain development through interleukin-6," is published in the October 3 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

September 25, 2007 - Two Caltech faculty members were named MacArthur Fellows today, each winning a five-year, $500,000 grant awarded to creative, original individuals that is often referred to as the "genius grant." Michael Elowitz, Bren Scholar and assistant professor of biology and applied physics, and Paul W. Rothemund, a senior research fellow in computation and neural systems and computer science, are two of 24 MacArthur Fellows honored today.

September 5, 2007 - Three leading cancer researchers will discuss "Novel Approaches to Cancer Treatment" at the 10th California Institute of Technology Biology Forum at 8 p.m. September 24 in Beckman Auditorium on the Caltech campus in Pasadena. The event is free and open to the public. Tickets are not required. The presenters will be Dr. Michael Friedman, Chief Executive Officer at the City of Hope; Dr. David Baltimore, Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Biology and president emeritus of Caltech; and Dr. Mark Davis, Warren and Katharine Schlinger Professor of Chemical Engineering at Caltech.

June 28, 2007 - Without the 250 microbe species that populate their guts, termites would derive no fuel from the wood they chew. The details of this remarkable symbiosis, which are being explored by a Caltech scientist, may also be relevant to our own fuel needs.

May 25, 2007 - Malaria infects more than half a billion people every year, and kills more than one million, mostly children. Despite decades of effort, no effective vaccine exists for the disease, caused by single-celled Plasmodium parasites. The parasites are transmitted to humans via the bite of infected mosquitoes. One way to stop malaria is to make the mosquitoes that carry the disease themselves resistant to the pathogen. Getting disease-fighting genes into the mosquito population can be tricky, however, because bugs carrying disease-resistance genes are likely to be less reproductively fit than their wild counterparts, and thus less likely to spread their genes naturally. Caltech Associate Professor of Biology Bruce Hay and his colleagues found a novel method for introducing such genes into insect populations. The work, published recently in the journal Science, involves the creation of a selfish genetic element that is uniquely adapted to spread itself quickly throughout the population.

May 2, 2007 - Four faculty members at the California Institute of Technology have been named to the National Academy of Sciences, an honor long considered one of the highest accolades in the scientific world. The election was held during the 144th annual meeting of the assembly in Washington, D.C.

April 10, 2007 - Because anti-cancer drugs have to be given in high volumes intravenously in order to get them to the tumor, the nausea, hair loss, and weakness that follow feels far worse than the disease. Inspired by his wife's illness, a Caltech chemical engineer is developing ways to send much lower doses straight to the tumor cells.

January 3, 2007 - Members of the Caltech/JPL community are invited to attend a gathering in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Max Delbruck, the creator of molecular biology. His influence on biology, especially at Caltech, continues to the present day in the vigorous and growing interface between physics, mathematics, and biology. Speakers will include former Delbruck laboratory members and others who have carried on the revolution that he began. At 1:00 p.m. on January 8, in the Beckman Institute auditorium.

January 3, 2007 - In the United States, only 40 percent of the general public agree that the theory of evolution is probably right, and of that fraction, only 50 percent believe it is guided by a superior intelligence. One of the reasons for this skepticism is a poor understanding of the quantitative foundations of the experimental aspects of evolution and neodarwinism. Dr. Robert H. Austin will discuss work to develop an experimental approach to understanding evolution dynamics of cells. January 8 at 4:00 p.m. in 119 Kerckhoff.

November 30, 2006 - Schizophrenia and autism spring from a complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors. Getting the flu while pregnant significantly enhances the child's risk; Caltech biologists are exploring the links between the mother's immune system and her unborn child's developing brain.

November 30, 2006 - Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of vision loss in Americans over 50, afflicting most of them to some degree. Researchers at Caltech and the University of California at San Francisco are working on a method to diagnose this irreversable disease early and halt its progress.

November 16, 2006 - In a development that could potentially benefit victims of degenerative neurological diseases, researchers have succeeded in stimulating the growth of neural stem cells in the adult brain. Such cells could then be directed towards repairing one's own brain.

November 9, 2006 - A group of 240 researchers from more than 70 institutions has announced the sequencing of the male California purple sea urchin. An animal frequently used in experiments, its genome has been studied intensely for years at Caltech's Kerckhoff Marine Biological Laboratory (KML), and will contribute significantly to biomedical advances of the future.

September 13, 2006 - The California Institute of Technology has received an $18-million federal grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute for the creation of a Center of Excellence in Genomic Science. The goal of the center will be to image and mutate every developmentally important gene in vertebrates—that is, animals with backbones.

August 4, 2006 - Biologists for the first time have obtained a three-dimensional image of the complete bacterial flagellum assembly using a new technology called electron cryotomography. The image shows in unprecedented detail both the rotor of the flagellum and the stator, or protein assembly that not only attaches the rotor to the cell wall, but also generates the torque that serves to rotate it.

July 28, 2006 - According to Assistant Professor of Biology Grant Jensen, a cell is like a multistory factory--a set of interwoven production lines complete with conveyor belts, forklifts, and steel I-beams to hold up the roof. An emerging field called electron cryotomography can make 3-D pictures of all the working parts of all the molecular machinery inside an individual cell at once.

July 28, 2006 - Bacteria don't deserve their bad reputation. Geobiologist Dianne K. Newman speaks up for them, and explores the inner workings of bacterial biofilms. "As a microbiologist," she says, "I'm appalled when I go to buy soap or dishwashing detergent, because these days it's very hard to find anything that doesn't say 'antibacterial' on it."

June 14, 2006 - The California Institute of Technology has been awarded a five-year grant for $4.6 million from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to develop a program for discovering medications aimed either at helping people avoid nicotine addiction or at helping smokers to quit. The project will include researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder and from Targacept, a North Carolina-based biopharmaceutical company whose scientists are leaders in research focused on a class of receptors known as neuronal nicotinic receptors.

June 13, 2006 - Beginning next year, six newly admitted freshmen at the California Institute of Technology will also be offered early admission to the University of California, San Diego, (UCSD) School of Medicine, pending completion of their Caltech degrees as "medical scholars."

June 7, 2006 - Biologists have pinned down a key evolutionary relationship that links lampreys with other vertebrates, including humans. Although lampreys and humans shared their last common ancestor some 560 million years ago, it turns out that the SoxE family of genes is involved in facial development of lampreys during neural crest development, just as SoxE is responsible for formation of the human pharynx and parts of the jaw.

May 10, 2006 - There's a time soon after conception when the stem cells in a tiny area of the embryo called the neural crest work overtime to build such structures as the dorsal root ganglia, various neurons of the nervous system, and the bones and cartilage of the skull. Biologists have determined that neural crest precursors can be identified at surprisingly early stages of development.

May 1, 2006 - Seymour Benzer, a Caltech neuroscientist, molecular biologist, and physicist who uncovered genetic links to behavior in fruit flies that today serve as the foundation for the study and treatment of human neurological diseases, has been named the recipient of the $500,000 Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research.

April 26, 2006 - Tell me where are emotions bred: Or in the heart or in the head? how begot, how nourished: "With gazing fed," a neuroscientist replies. "It is engendered in the eyes." Shakespeare was closer to the mark than he knew.

April 24, 2006 - According to researchers, the shapes of letters and symbols used throughout history by the world's many cultures may have arisen to take advantage of the way human vision has evolved to see common structures and shapes in nature.

April 12, 2006 - Caltech has been awarded $2.3 million from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine to support 10 postdoctoral scholars in the Caltech Stem Cell Biology Training Program. The grant is one of 16 that were awarded by CIRM to non-profit institutions in California. The grants total $12.1 million and are intended to train the next generation of stem cell researchers. They are the first grants awarded by the California stem cell agency.

April 3, 2006 - Biologists have determined how plant cells, with purely local information about their nearest neighbors' internal concentration of a hormone called auxin, can communicate to determine the position of new flowers or leaves.

March 29, 2006 - By studying epileptic patients awaiting brain surgery, neuroscientists for the first time have located single neurons that are involved in recognizing whether a stimulus is new or old. The discovery demonstrates that the human brain not only has neurons for processing new information never seen before, but also neurons to recognize old information that has been seen just once.

March 14, 2006 - Caltech senior research associate Akiko Kumagai and her colleagues have shown that a protein with the unusual name "TopBP1" is responsible for activating the cascade of reactions that prohibit cells from dividing with corrupted genetic blueprints. The researchers say the result is a key molecular insight that could lead to molecular breakthroughs in cancer therapy.

March 9, 2006 - Researchers have devised a method of database-mining to make predictions about genetic interactions. The new procedure computationally integrates several sources of data from several organisms to study the tiny worm C. elegans, or nematode, an animal commonly used in biological experiments.

March 2, 2006 - We old-world primates evolved our particular brand of color vision so that we could subtly discriminate slight changes in skin tone due to blushing and blanching, researchers say. The work may answer a long-standing question about why trichromat vision (that is, color via three cone receptors) evolved in the first place in primates.

February 24, 2006 - D. Allan Drummond, Caltech graduate student in computation and neural systems, will present a lecture entitled "Darwin's Dumpster: How Cellular Sloppiness Governs the Rate of Evolution." The Everhart Lecture Series is a forum to encourage interdisciplinary interaction among graduate students and faculty, to share ideas about recent research developments, and to recognize exemplary presentation and research abilities. At 4 p.m. on March 1, in 101 Guggenheim Lab, Lees-Kubota Lecture Hall.

January 11, 2006 - To preserve the integrity of their genomes, cells employ an enormous crew of maintenance genes to repair genetic damage. In a landmark study featured on the cover of the December issue of the open-access journal PLoS Genetics, Caltech professor of chemistry and biology Judith L. Campbell and her colleagues and collaborators in the laboratory of Charles Boone at the University of Toronto, reveal for the first time all of the 322 genes that make up that work force in yeast.

December 19, 2005 - Caltech's "fly room" may not be the best place to adopt a pet, but over the years it has served a number of researchers in the Division of Biology--among them, the late Ed Lewis, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1995 for his fundamental work in fruit-fly genetics. The fly room contains hundreds of culture bottles, each the size and shape of a milk bottle and containing enough nutrient to keep about a hundred flies nourished for their 30-day life spans.

November 29, 2005 - For more than 70 years, scientists have been trying to figure out how bees' haphazard and aerodynamically unsound flapping can keep the hefty bugs aloft. Caltech's Michael H. Dickinson and his postdoc Douglas L. Altshuler and their colleagues have finally figured it out, using a combination of high-speed digital photography to snap freeze-frame images of bees in motion, and a giant robotic mock-up of a bee wing. The results of their analysis appear in the November 28 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

November 22, 2005 - Athanassios Siapas, assistant professor of computation and neural systems, has received a McKnight Scholar Award to support his work in cortico-hippocampal interactions and memory formation. This award, granted by the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience, was given for innovative research in neuroscience as it pertains to memory and, ultimately, to a clearer understanding and treatment of diseases affecting memory. Siapas will receive a grant of $225,000 over the next three years.

November 21, 2005 - A strain of genetically engineered mice created by Caltech neuroscientist Joanna L. Jankowsky and her colleagues offers an unprecedented opportunity to test new drugs being developed to stop the formation of amyloid plaques in Alzheimer's disease patients. The drugs are the focus of intense research efforts by pharmaceutical companies, but until now, methods to test their efficacy have been limited.

October 10, 2005 - The National Cancer Institute recently awarded an $18 million grant to the new Nanosystems Biology Cancer Center at Caltech. A collaborative effort with the Institute for Systems Biology and UCLA, the center will place a focus on development and validation of tools for early detection and stratification of the disease. James Heath, the Gilloon Professor of Chemistry, will direct.

September 16, 2005 - Biotech Industry Night brings together those interested in pursuing a career in biotechnology with industry leaders from established biotech and pharmaceutical companies. Caltech students and postdocs can network and get to know company representatives during the reception. From 4 to 7 p.m. on September 21, in Alumni House.

September 12, 2005 - A three-year, $2.3 million grant was earmarked recently for the creation of the Caltech Stem-Cell Training Program. The grant is part of the first round of funding resulting from the passage by California voters of the California Stem Cell Research and Cures Initiative. The bond measure provides $3 billion over the next ten years to support human embryonic stem-cell research at California universities and research institutions.

August 11, 2005 - Smell is an "old" sense. In primates, including humans, olfaction has been overtaken by vision, but it has kept its ancient connections to the emotional parts of the brain.

July 20, 2005 - Masakazu "Mark" Konishi, a Caltech neuroscientist renowned for his work on the neural wiring that allows owls to swoop in on their prey in darkness, and his former postdoctoral researcher Eric Knudsen, have been awarded this year's Peter Gruber Foundation Neuroscience Prize.

July 13, 2005 - Caltech graduate David Powers has received a 2005-06 Fulbright grant to pursue graduate studies abroad, joining the prestigious ranks of other Fulbright recipients. Powers, who graduated with honors in June with a BS in chemistry, will undertake a research project in environmental biochemistry at Nagasaki University this coming academic year.

June 22, 2005 - Caltech engineers John Dabiri and Mory Gharib report on their work in understanding the fundamental nature of biological fluid transport. The work could lead to new tools for diagnosing heart disease.

June 17, 2005 - A research team of neuroscientists from Caltech and UCLA has found that a single neuron can recognize people, landmarks, and objects—even letter strings of names ("H-A-L-L-E-B-E-R-R-Y").

June 1, 2005 - Emeritus professor of biology Norman Horowitz, a geneticist best known for his work on the "one-gene, one-enzyme" hypothesis and the experiments aboard the Viking lander to search for life on Mars in 1976, died on Wednesday, June 1, at his home in Pasadena. He was 90.

May 26, 2005 - A food article in the current L.A. Weekly on Sichuan restaurants in Monterey Park touches on an area of study being conducted by Seymor Benzer, the Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, Emeritus. Having identified the genes that govern gastronomic preference, Benzer has genetically modified fruit flies so that they enjoy wasabi and chili sauce, condiments that they usually avoid.

May 19, 2005 - Caltech neuroscientists have traced the neural wiring between the amygdala, which is involved in the initial response to cues that signal love or war, and the hypothalamus, which coordinates the innate reproductive or defensive behaviors triggered by these cues. They think they may have identified the genes involved in laying down the wiring itself.

May 10, 2005 - Where do Caltech students go after graduation, and what do they do? The answer is everywhere and everything, as this year's Distinguished Alumni Awards will attest. The award is the highest honor Caltech gives to a graduate for a noteworthy achievement or career. This year's awards will be presented on May 21 during the Alumni Reunion Weekend. The recipients range from a mechanical engineer who developed a cardiovascular catheter to a biologist who codeveloped a cancer drug, and now fights famine in Ethiopia.

May 3, 2005 - Caltech's newest members of the National Academy of Sciences are Richard Andersen, James Eisenstein, and Wallace Sargent. Roger Blandford, a former Caltech faculty member and current visiting associate in physics, is also among the electees.

April 30, 2005 - Nelly Khidekel, a graduate student in biochemistry, will give the Everhart Lecture on May 5. Entitled "The Sweeter Side of Cell Signaling: O-GlcNAc Glycosylation in the Brain," the talk will be held at 4 p.m. in Lees-Kubota Lecture Hall, 101 Guggenheim Lab. Refreshments will be served before the lecture.

April 19, 2005 - The late Caltech Nobel Laureate Ed Lewis will be honored for his service as a meteorologist during World War II with the dedication of the weather station on the Caltech campus. On April 26, at 4:30 p.m., in the lobby of Campus Planning.

March 22, 2005 - Richard Andersen, Boswell Professor of Neuroscience at Caltech, and Kai Zinn, professor of biology, have each received a 2005 McKnight Neuroscience of Brain Disorder Award. Andersen's work focuses on brain-implant technology that may allow paralyzed patients to use their thoughts to move artificial limbs. Zinn's research centers on prions, their formation, and their possible functions in the healthy brain.

March 11, 2005 - Lili Yang, a postdoctoral scholar, and David Baltimore, professor of biology, Caltech president, and Nobel Prize recipient, have developed a new methodology that may someday fight cancer. Their animal model was the mouse, and while mice are often not predictive of behavior in humans, says Baltimore, "everything we have done is in principle possible to do in humans, so we plan to try to develop a system for optimizing the ability to program human stem cells." Their report appears in the current online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

February 26, 2005 - Tanja Bosak, a graduate student in geobiology, will present an Everhart Lecture titled "Were Microbes the Architects of Ancient Shorelines?" At 4 p.m. on March 3, in Lees-Kubota Lecture Hall, 101 Guggenheim Lab.

February 18, 2005 - Caltech neurobiologist Gilles Laurent studies the neuronal mechanisms underlying perception and behavior, focusing on olfactory coding: how are odors represented, learned, stored, and recognized by the brain? On Wednesday, February 23, at 8 p.m., Laurent will summarize some of the recent research advances in his talk, "The Sense of Smell: A Window into the Brain and Memory," part of the ongoing Ernest C. Watson Lecture Series.

January 4, 2005 - Nativism is the view that there are ideas, beliefs, knowledge, or concepts that are inborn or innate; it's the idea that some of what we know is already in us to start with. Reviewing the reasons why a nativist holds that a large amount of linguistic knowledge is innately known, Fiona Cowie offers some reasons why she doesn't believe it is.

January 3, 2005 - Women and girls are invited to share a pot of tea and learn about molecular mechanisms and organism function with Dianne K. Newman, Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Geobiology and Environmental Science and Engineering at Caltech. This Ladies of Science tea will take place on January 9 from 2 to 4 p.m., at the Skirball Center. Tickets may be purchased by calling (310) 440-4500.

January 1, 2005 - The workshop "Engineering a DNA World," which runs from January 6 through 8, will explore the possibility of engineering sophisticated molecular systems in which all major functional roles are played by nucleic acids. In the Broad Center's Rock Auditorium, beginning at 8 a.m.

November 4, 2004 - Caltech researchers have identified a group of brain receptors in mice that appear to be responsible for the addictive effects of nicotine. These findings by postdoctoral scholar Andrew Tapper, Bren Professor of Biology Henry Lester, and eight other colleagues, may help scientists find targets for drugs aimed to help smokers kick their habit.

October 22, 2004 - Michael Dickinson, Zarem Professor of Bioengineering, will present an Earnest C. Watson Lecture on the subject of the flight of these underappreciated little insects. Besides providing a rare glimpse into the cockpit of a fly, the results of Dickinson's research may lead to the construction of a new class of miniature flying robots. Admission is free. At 8 p.m. on October 27 in Beckman Auditorium.

October 21, 2004 - In response to the arduously slow progress in finding cures for AIDS and cancer, Caltech biologists have established the Engineering Immunity project, designed to create a novel immunological approach to treating--and even some day preventing--HIV infection and some cancers like melanoma. A $1.5 million matching grant from the Skirball Foundation was used to launch this project.

October 14, 2004 - A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. today in honor of biologist Edward Lewis, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for his work on how genes regulate the development of specific regions of the body. Lewis, 86, died on July 21 after a long battle with cancer. The service will be held in Beckman Auditorium and a reception in Dabney Gardens will follow.

October 6, 2004 - Biologist Erin Schuman is interested in how memories are formed--or forgotten. She and graduate student Miguel Remondes, now at MIT, have confirmed that the brain's "temporoammonic pathway" plays a vital role in forging long-term memories.

October 1, 2004 - "Sometimes letting nature tell you what's important is the better way to go," says Caltech biologist Raymond Deshaies. He's referring to new work to come out of his lab that defies conventional thinking--they've discovered a chemical that stops a key cell function, but, more importantly, suggests a new possible target within a cell, once thought to be untenable, for future therapeutic drugs

September 28, 2004 - The late Caltech geneticist Ed Lewis played a pivotal role in the national debate on nuclear testing. It was known that high-energy radiation caused mutations in fruit flies in proportion to the dose, but the Atomic Energy Commission assumed that a threshold existed below which no harm would occur in humans. It fell to Lewis and others to enlighten the Commission.

September 15, 2004 - New evidence shows that a stressed fly emits an odor that makes other flies avoid the space in which the stressful event occurred. The work could lead to more effective insect repellents.

September 3, 2004 - Caltech's Alexander Varshavsky has been named a corecipient of the Protein Society's 2005 Stein and Moore Award. The Smits Professor of Cell Biology codiscovered the ubiquitin system, which is now central to a variety of biological processes: the cell cycle, cell growth and death, and the immune response, to name a few. The ubiquitin system has also become the cornerstone of cancer research.

August 6, 2004 - Oriented cell division is a fundamental process in developing organisms, whether you are a worm, a fruit fly--or a human. Now for the first time, researchers at Caltech report that the molecular machinery that underlies oriented cell division in invertebrates serves a twofold purpose in the development of the vertebrate embryo.

July 22, 2004 - Edward Lewis, winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking studies of how genes regulate the development of specific regions of the body, died on July 21 at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena after a long battle with cancer. He was 86.

July 16, 2004 - Jacqueline Barton, Hanisch Memorial Professor and Professor of Chemistry, Caltech, will give a talk on DNA for summer research (SURF) students on July 21, at noon, in Sturdivant Lecture Hall, 153 Noyes.

July 10, 2004 - "Connections, Foundations, and Edges: A Celebration to Mark John Doyle's 50th Birthday," on July 15 and 16, brings experts in an interactive exchange of ideas on the design, analysis, and control of complex systems. A day of student talks takes place on July 17. Click on the link for schedule and registration.

July 8, 2004 - Caltech neuroscientists have made great strides in the quest to create prosthetic devices operated by brain activity which could permit paralyzed patients to operate computers, robots, motorized wheelchairs--and perhaps someday even automobiles.

June 24, 2004 - Neurons in the brain signal one another by secreting special chemicals called neurotransmitters. So-called "minis"--miniature excitatory synaptic events--are single packets of neurotransmitters that trail the main event, and are long thought to have no biological significance. On the contrary, says post-doc Michael Sutton, minis may play an important role in regulating protein synthesis.

May 25, 2004 - "In a game of chess, a player can anticipate various outcomes before making a definite move," says Caltech postdoc Elizabeth Torres. With body movement, the brain does something similar. It employs a transitional stage to simulate a movement. This transition occurs between the visual cues sent by the eye (here's the object you want), and the actual movement of bone and tissue to grab it.

May 19, 2004 - Researchers report that the color of an object can be misassigned, even as observers are intently watching an ongoing event, because of the way the brain combines the perceptions of motion and color.

May 16, 2004 - Professor Kevin Scanlon of the Keck Graduate Institute will address the Caltech Biotechnology Club about pursuing successful careers in the field of biotechnology. He will focus on how students with scientific backgrounds can become effective business leaders. Reservations: ye@caltech.edu. At 4 p.m. on May 21, in the Sherman Fairchild Library's multimedia conference room.

May 14, 2004 - Nina Jablonski, Irvine Chair and Curator of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences, will present a discussion of the evolution of skin color in humans as part of the Leakey Speaker Series on Human Origins. At 8 p.m. on May 19, in Beckman Auditorium.

May 4, 2004 - Almost every day some virus or other makes news--HIV, SARS, smallpox as a bioweapon, last fall's new flu, and, most recently, the avian flu in Southeast Asia. But David Baltimore's impression is that most people don't know what a virus is.

March 8, 2004 - In the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), graduate student Eliot Bush and his professor, John Allman, report their discovery of a basic difference between the brains of primates and carnivores.

February 29, 2004 - The Caltech Biotechnology Club Speaker Series presents the last of its "Amgen in Focus" seminars on March 5, at 4 p.m. Dr. Roger Perlmutter, executive VP of research and development at Amgen, will speak. The lecture, to be held in Beckman Institute auditorium, will be followed by a reception. Reservations: biotech@caltech.edu.

February 11, 2004 - The two scientists who pioneered the scientific study of consciousness, Christof Koch and Francis Crick, think that "zombie agents"—that is, routine behaviors that we perform without even thinking—deserve serious scientific attention. In a new book titled The Quest for Consciousness, Caltech neuroscientist Koch asserts that much of what goes on in our heads escapes awareness.

January 30, 2004 - Edward Lewis, who pioneered the modern understanding of how genes regulate the development of specific regions of the body, will be honored at a February 4 celebration.

December 9, 2003 - Caltech neuroscientist John Allman and his colleagues have identified a special class of neurons, found only in humans and some of the great apes, called spindle cells. These relatively enormous cells may lie at the heart of the human social emotion circuitry, perhaps even providing a moral sense.

November 24, 2003 - Researchers in the Division of Biology at Caltech, in collaboration with UCLA's Jonsson Cancer Center, have discovered that brain tumors may be derived from the cells that form the nervous system.

November 24, 2003 - If the goal is to reverse-engineer an insect, and incorporate its design into a miniature flying device, flies are an excellent choice.

November 21, 2003 - Christof Koch, Caltech's Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology and professor of computation and neural systems, is featured on the cover of the November 21 issue of the LA Weekly. The in-depth article, "Extreme Science: The Zombie Within—Christof Koch and His Quest for Consciousness," explores Koch's research and his life.

November 12, 2003 - Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but a new psychophysical study from Caltech's Shinsuke Shimojo and his colleagues suggests that the length of the beholding is important, too.

October 9, 2003 - A panel discussion on new Alzheimer's diagnostic technologies and treatments will take place at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, October 14, in Beckman Auditorium. This event, "Remembering the Past, Imaging the Future: Diagnosing and Treating Alzheimer's Disease," is the ninth Caltech Biology Forum. It is free, open to the public, and tickets are not required.

September 29, 2003 - The 50th anniversary of DNA's double helix brings its codiscoverer back to campus for an impromptu, wide-ranging chat with David Baltimore.

September 26, 2003 - The Caltech-led WormBase project, an ongoing multi-institutional effort to make genetic information on the experimental animal known as C. elegans freely available to the world, has been augmented with a new $12 million grant from the National Human Genome Research Institute.

September 22, 2003 - Brenda Maddox, author of Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, will speak in Beckman Institute auditorium on October 7 at 8 p.m. Franklin, the subject of her book, worked with Watson and Crick on the double helix structure of DNA. Maddox resurrects the reputation of a scientist of great achievement, and supplies an arresting portrait of an intelligent and principled young woman.

September 17, 2003 - Brenda Maddox, who wrote the biography of British scientist and early DNA researcher Rosalind Franklin, will speak at the California Institute of Technology campus on October 7. The lecture, set for 8 p.m. in the Beckman Institute auditorium, is free and open to the public.

September 12, 2003 - Rubber may be to biology what silicon is to computer science. A Caltech team of applied physicists is trying to spark the equivalent of the PC revolution.

September 12, 2003 - A JPL inventor develops an early-warning biodetection device.

September 10, 2003 - Caltech president David Baltimore will discuss contemporary issues in genetics in "Paradise is Coming, but there are Bumps in the Road," a lecture at the Art Center College of Design at 7:30 p.m. September 12 at Art Center?s Ahmanson Auditorium. The lecture and a reception in the Williamson Gallery are free and open to the public.