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The article provides information on the research of neuroscientist Gilles Laurent of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, using locust as a model in experimenting the neural mechanisms of insects use to learn odors. He chose the locust as a model of his study in which he first began studying insect olfaction because it was a good way of tracing circuit function and neural computation in the brain. Meanwhile, the article also discusses the detailed experimental design and the results of the study.

Assesses the way Caltech handled two apparently unrelated cases of alleged scientific research fraud in the lab of biologist Leroy Hood. Comparisons to how the so-called Baltimore scientific fraud case was handled; Apparently falsified research paper figure of two research postdocs, Vipin Kumar and James Urban; Kumar's defense of his actions; Hood's decision to notify various agencies and universities involved with Kumar; Lingering concerns about Caltech's handling of cases.

The article presents a speech by doctor Richard P. Feynman, delivered at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society held at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California on December 29, 1959, in which he discussed the method in decreasing the size of things based on the laws of physics, information on a small scale and electron microscopes.

In Landscapes and Labscapes Robert Kohler emphasized the separation between laboratory and field cultures and the creation of new “hybrid” or mixed practices as field sciences matured in the early twentieth century. This article explores related changes in laboratory practices, especially novel designs for the analysis of organism–environment relations in the mid-twentieth century. American ecologist Victor Shelford argued in 1929 that technological improvements and indoor climate control should be applied to ecological laboratories, but his recommendations were too ambitious for the time. In the postwar period Frits W. Went, plant physiologist at the California Institute of Technology, created a new high-tech laboratory, dubbed a “phytotron”, in the hope that it would transform plant sciences by allowing for unprecedented control of environmental variables. Went’s aspirations, the research conducted in his laboratory, and its impact in initiating an international movement, are considered. Went’s laboratory can be seen as a “hybrid culture” evolving in the laboratory, complementing and intersecting with some of the field practices that Kohler describes. It was also a countercultural movement against the reductionist trends of molecular biology in the 1950s and 1960s. By considering the history of the laboratory in relation to field sciences, we can explore how new funding sources and cross-disciplinary relations affected the development of field sciences, especially in the postwar period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reveals that two researchers in the lab of Caltech biologist Leroy Hood are under investigation for two apparently unrelated instances of possible research fraud. Two recent papers have had to be retracted from journals.

The article relates a study on neurobiology, which investigates correlated brain activity in the efficiency and fairness of decision making. It mentions that Steven Quartz and colleagues of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, found that more efficient decisions correlated with more activity in a brain region called the putamen, whereas decisions that emphasized fairness correlated with more activity in the insula, which is involved with emotional processing.

The article reports on the study conducted by David Chenoweth and Peter Dervan of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California on the effect of cyclic polyamide binding in the DNA structure. The researchers have found out that polyamide can cause the compression of the major groove which will lead to the distortion of the structure of DNA. In addition, polyamide can cause helix to bend towards the major groove for more than 18%.