Weak Electrical Fields in the Brain Help Neurons Fire Together
02-03-11
Costas Anastassiou, a postdoctoral scholar working with Professor Christof Koch, and colleagues have found that coordinated behavior occurs in the brain whether or not neurons are actually connected via synapses. To tease out the effects, Anastassiou and his colleagues, focused on strong but slowly oscillating fields, called local field potentials (LFP), that arise from neural circuits composed of just a few rat brain cells. Measuring those fields and their effects required positioning a cluster of tiny electrodes within a volume equivalent to that of a single cell body—and at distances of less than 50 millionths of a meter from one another. [Caltech Press Release]
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Costas Anastassiou
Christof Koch
New Reactor Paves the Way for Efficiently Producing Fuel from Sunlight
01-20-11
Sossina Haile, Professor of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering, and colleagues have built a reactor at the heart of which is a cylindrical lining of ceria—a metal oxide. The reactor takes advantage of ceria's ability to "exhale" oxygen from its crystalline framework at very high temperatures and then "inhale" oxygen back in at lower temperatures - concentrating solar energy in order to convert carbon dioxide and water into fuels . Ultimately, Haile says, the process could be adopted in large-scale energy plants, allowing solar-derived power to be reliably available during the day and night. [Caltech Press Release]
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Sossina Haile
fuel
energy
metal oxide
reactor
Professor Arnold Wins Draper Prize
01-04-11
Frances Arnold, Dick and Barbara Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering and Biochemistry, is a co-recipient of the Charles Stark Draper Prize by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Professor Arnold has recieved the Draper Prize, which is the highest honor in the engineering profession, for a method called directed evolution, used worldwide to guide the creation of certain properties in proteins and cells, allowing the engineering of novel enzymes and biocatalytic processes for pharmaceutical and chemical products. [Caltech Press Release]
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Frances Arnold
Draper Prize
