Michael Dickinson, Esther M. and Abe M. Zarem Professor of Bioengineering, and graduate student Gwyneth Card have determined the secret to a fly's evasive maneuvering using high-resolution, high-speed digital imaging of fruit flies faced with that looming swatter. Read more... 09.02.08

Michael Dickinson, Esther M. and Abe M. Zarem Professor of Bioengineering, is among the 190 new Fellows elected to the American Michael DickinsonAcademy of Arts and Sciences this year. Dickinson studies animal physiology and behavior and has become well known for Robofly, a mechanical fly that sprang from his work on the neurobiology and biomechanics of fly locomotion. Throughout his career, Dickinson has used a variety of tools, such as wind tunnels, virtual reality simulators, high-speed video, and giant robotic models, to determine how the poppy seed-sized brains of these tiny insects can rapidly control aerodynamic forces. More than a simple understanding of the material basis for insect flight, Dickinson's studies provide insight into complex systems operating on biological and physical principles: neuronal signaling within brains, the dynamics of unsteady fluid flow, the structural mechanics of composite materials, and the behavior of nonlinear systems are all linked when a fly takes wing. Read more... 04.30.08

View the latest Watson Lecture on line: In a talk entitled The Next-Generation Neural Implant: Let's Start with Retinal Implants, Professor Yu-Chong Tai discusses the technology of retinal implants and recent progress in their development. 03.27.08

Using a flight simulator, Michael Dickinson, the Zarem Professor of Bioengineering, and postdoctoral students Gaby Maimon and Andrew Straw, have come closer to understanding what guides the decision making of the common fruit fly as it zips through space. Their experiments were conducted on both free-flying flies and on flies tethered within a virtual-reality flight simulator. In the flight simulator, flies could steer toward or away from images displayed on an electronic panorama. "We can present the fly with different scenes and the fly reacts to them, like a 12-year-old boy playing a video game," says Dickinson. Read more...03.25.08

Christof Koch, the Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology and Professor of omputation and Neural Systems, and his colleagues, have found that changes in pupil diameter correspondto the moment when a simple decision is made. The pupil, which is about 2 mm wide in bright light, dilated by as much as 1 mm at that moment--a change that, in theory, could be noticeable to a casual observer. Read more... 02.12.08

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...

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