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Christof
Koch, Troendle Professor of Cognitive
and Behavioral Biology and professor of computation
and neural systems, is featured in the October 23 issue
of "U. S. News & World Report". The special
report, "Is There Room for the Soul? New Challenges
to Our Most Cherished Beliefs About Self and the Human
Spirit," examines various theories about the nature
of consciousness and the human species. The article
discusses Koch's work with the late Francis Crick on
the biological basis and neural correlates of consciousness.
A new $4.4-million grant from the National Science Foundation will allow a research
team, lead by Michael Dickinson,
Zarem Professor of Bioengineering, to develop techniques to turn brain cells
on and off in animals as they go about their daily activities, allowing the scientists
to understand the details of how brain activity lead to complex behaviors. The
five-year program is aimed at solving one of the remaining great challenges facing
biologists---understanding the mechanistic basis of complex behavior. The work
will focus on fruit flies, which are a powerful model system understood extremely
well at the genetic level. Read
more...
A
team of physicists, mathematicians, and electrical engineers
has figured out a trick to keep light pulses from diverging
or focusing as they travel over a distance. Using a multi-layer
sandwich of glass plates alternating with air, the scientists
have provided the first experimental demonstration of a
procedure called "nonlinearity management." This
technique could be useful in future generations of devices
involving optical switching and optical information processing,
for which precise control of laser pulses will be advantageous.
Reporting in the July 21, 2006, issue of Physical Review
Letters, the researchers demonstrate that a laser beam passing
through multiple layers of glass and air can be made to
last much longer than if it had passed through only one
type of medium. Mason Porter and Martin Centurion, postdocs
from the Center for the Physics of Information, Demetri
Psaltis, the Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering, and
Panayotis Kevrekidis, Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst are the principals of this investigation. Read
more...
The
ASCIT Teaching Awards were recently announced, with professor Ali
Hajimi among those honored for their exceptional teaching.
Kudos!
Richard M. Murray has been named the Thomas E. and Doris Everhart Professor
of Control and Dynamical Systems. He has also recently won the Feynman
Teaching Prize.
Professor
Ali Hajimiri and former graduate
students, Dr. Xiang Guan and Professor Hossein
Hashemi (USC) received the Best Paper Award
for the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits
for their article titled: "A Fully-Integrated
24GHz Eight-Element Phased Array Receiver
in Silicon" for its groundbreaking nature
in enabling a new generation of communication
devices and on-chip radar. Also at International
Solid-State Circuits Conference in February
2006, a team of Caltech graduate students
supervised by Professor Hajimiri reported
a complete phased-array radar transceiver
with on-chip antennas at 77GHz showing an
unprecedented level of mm-wave integration
in silicon.
Pietro
Perona, Professor of Electrical Engineering, and Richard
Murray, Professor of Control and Dynamical
Systems, have been awarded
two of the 30 program awards from the federal
Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative
(MURI) Program. Perona's is for "learning
to recognize for visual surveillance"; and
Murray's is for "specification, design,
and verification of distributed embedded systems."
One of the most elusive questions in science has finally been answered: How
do bees fly? The physics of bee flight has perplexed scientists for more
than 70 years. But now, Michael
H. Dickinson, the Esther M. and Abe M. Zarem Professor of Bioengineering,
and his postdoctoral student Douglas L. Altshuler and their colleagues at Caltech
and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, have figured out honeybee flight 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 secret of honeybee
flight is the unconventional combination of short, choppy wing strokes, a rapid
rotation of the wing as it flops over and reverses direction, and a very fast
wing-beat frequency.
Professor
Yu-Chong Tai, Executive Officer of Electrical
Engineering, has been elected an IEEE Fellow for his
extraordinary record of accomplishments; in particular,
Tai is being cited for contributions to integrated
nano/micro electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and nano/micro-fluidics
for Lab-on-a-Chip applications. Congratulations!
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