Catherine Bingchan Xie, a senior bioengineering major and English minor at Caltech, has been selected to receive a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which will fund her graduate studies at the University of Cambridge for the next academic year. Xie, a Canadian citizen, is one of 51 new international recipients selected from a pool of more than 4,000 applicants based not only on intellectual ability, but also on leadership capacity and a commitment to improving the lives of others.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and—as researchers have now shown—in the brain as well.
The researchers, led by scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), have used a well-known, noninvasive technique to electrically stimulate a specific region deep inside the brain previously thought to be inaccessible. The stimulation, the scientists say, caused volunteers to judge faces as more attractive than before their brains were stimulated.
The genes that code for proteins—more than 20,000 in total—make up only about 1 percent of the complete human genome. That entire thing—not just the genes, but also genetic junk and all the rest—is coiled and folded up in any number of ways within the nucleus of each of our cells. Think, then, of the challenge that a protein or other molecule, like RNA, faces when searching through that material to locate a target gene.
Biologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have worked out the details of a mechanism that leads undifferentiated blood stem cells to become macrophages—immune cells that attack bacteria and other foreign pathogens. The process involves an unexpected cycle in which cell division slows, leading to an increased accumulation of a particular regulatory protein that in turn slows cell division further. The finding provides new insight into how stem cells are guided to generate one cell type as opposed to another.
During the past century, programmable technologies evolved from spinning gears and vacuum tubes to transistors and microchips. Now, a group of Caltech researchers and their colleagues at the University of Washington, Harvard University, and UC San Francisco are exploring how biologically important molecules—like DNA, RNA, and proteins—could be the next generation of programmable devices.
