You're driving along in your car and catch a glimpse of a green SUV out of the corner of your eye. A few seconds later, you glance over, and to your surprise discover that the SUV is actually brown.

PASADENA—Two members of the California Institute of Technology faculty, chemist Harry Gray and biologist Seymour Benzer, are among this year's recipients of the prestigious Benjamin Franklin Medals.

Everybody from the Tarzan fan to the evolutionary biologist knows that our human brain is more like a chimpanzee's than a dog's. But is our brain also more like a tiny lemur's than a lion's?

PASADENA, Ca.--When you're close to that woman you love this Valentine's Day, her fragrance may cause you to say to yourself, "Hmmm, Chanel No. 5," especially if you're the suave, sophisticated kind. Or if you're more of a missing link, you may even say to yourself, "Me want woman." In either case, you're exhibiting a zombie behavior, according to the two scientists who pioneered the scientific study of consciousness.

PASADENA—Edward Lewis, who pioneered the modern understanding of how genes regulate the development of specific regions of the body, will be honored at a special celebration on the California Institute of Technology campus at 4 p.m. Wednesday, February 4.

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but a new psychophysical study from the California Institute of Technology suggests that the length of the beholding is important, too.

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. The money will be distributed over five years for ongoing work on the genome database, which since its inception in 2000 has become a major resource for biomedical researchers as well as biologists attempting to better understand individual genes and how they interrelate.

Mapping and manipulating the neural circuits involved in such innate behaviors as fear.

California Institute of Technology biologist Mary Kennedy has been named project director for a $4 million federal project grant to better understand how the brain processes signals. Progress could lead to new insights into how drugs can be better custom-designed to treat a host of neurodegenerative disorders, mental illnesses, and disabilities, including Alzheimer's disease, depression, and schizophrenia.

The funding will come from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

April 18, 2003 Science paper shows that tiny insects use their wings to overcome inertia, and not--as conventional wisdom has held--friction.