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Researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey, Taronga Conservation Society Australia, The National Trust of Fiji and NatureFiji-MareqetiViti have discovered a new species of banded iguana.

The new species of lizard, Brachylophus gau, is one of only four living species of South Pacific iguana, and is restricted to the island of Gau, Republic of Fiji. The scientists describe this new addition in an article released with the journal Zootaxa.

Caltech researchers have identified a neural circuit in the brain that controls wakefulness. The findings have implications for treating insomnia, oversleeping, and sleep disturbances that accompany other neuropsychiatric disorders, such as depression.

The work was done in the laboratory of Viviana Gradinaru (BS '05), assistant professor of biology and biological engineering, Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator, and director of the Center for Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech. It appears in the June 8 online edition of the journal Neuron.

Future climate warming could lead to a re-greening of the southernmost Sahara (Sahel), with decreased dust emissions and changes in land cover. In a recent study, researchers at the Department of Meteorology have found that tropical cyclone activity may have increased during past warm climates in connection with a greening of the Sahara.

In the event of a natural disaster that disrupts phone and Internet systems over a wide area, autonomous aircraft could potentially hover over affected regions, carrying communications payloads that provide temporary telecommunications coverage to those in need.

However, such unpiloted aerial vehicles, or UAVs, are often expensive to operate, and can only remain in the air for a day or two, as is the case with most autonomous surveillance aircraft operated by the U.S. Air Force. Providing adequate and persistent coverage would require a relay of multiple aircraft, landing and refueling around the clock, with operational costs of thousands of dollars per hour, per vehicle. 

If you think self-driving cars can’t get here soon enough, you’re not alone. But programming computers to recognize objects is very technically challenging, especially since scientists don’t fully understand how our own brains do it.

Now, Salk Institute researchers have analyzed how neurons in a critical part of the brain, called V2, respond to natural scenes, providing a better understanding of vision processing. The work is described in Nature Communications on June 8, 2017.

“Understanding how the brain recognizes visual objects is important not only for the sake of vision, but also because it provides a window on how the brain works in general,” says Tatyana Sharpee, an associate professor in Salk’s Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and senior author of the paper. “Much of our brain is composed of a repeated computational unit, called a cortical column. In vision especially we can control inputs to the brain with exquisite precision, which makes it possible to quantitatively analyze how signals are transformed in the brain.”