Nobel Laureate and City College alum John O’Keefe traces historic findings on the hippocampus and human memory to his recent research on the brain’s cognitive map. O’Keefe, along with two other scientists, won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering an inner GPS in the brain that helps navigate surroundings. His engaging, and…

By the end of the century, Michio Kaku sees a world in which humans will have x-ray vision, and micromachines — smaller than the period at the end of this sentence — will perform surgery. “Your computerized toilet will be able to analyze proteins emitted from a colony of cancer cells from excretions,” says Kaku, co-founder of string field theory an…

In a White House ceremony earlier this year, Anthony Carpi, professor of Environmental Toxicology at John Jay College, was recognized with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring — the most prestigious honor in his field. “It was an absolute thrill to see the program that we had initiated become so ef…

Human population growth has long been linked to global warming, but according to Deborah Balk its impact may be overemphasized. “Future population growth does have a role,” says Balk, the associate director of the CUNY Institute for Demographic Research and professor at Baruch College School of Public Affairs. “But climate change is mainly driven b…

Is Evolution Over? William Bialek, the Graduate Center’s Visiting Presidential Professor of Physics, argues that evolution has pushed living systems to operate at the limits of what the laws of physics allow. “There are many places,” Bialek says, “where organisms have been pushed to, basically, an endpoint of evolution.” In a lecture at the Graduat…

The ability to learn and mimic vocal sounds is rare in nature but found in certain birds and in dolphins says Diana Reiss, professor of psychology at Hunter College. “There’s been a lot of anecdotal reporting over the years that dolphins are highly mimetic,” says Reiss, an expert on dolphin cognition. City College associate professor of biology, Of…

Since 1980, when Phase 1 drug tests were banned in the United States, the pharmaceutical industry has relied on medical volunteers to participate in safety trials of new drugs. In his recently published book, “The Professional Guinea Pig: Big Pharma and the Risky World of Human Subjects,” Robert Abadie, an anthropologist and a visiting scholar in t…

Instead of debating why science and technology remain male-dominated fields, Julie Des Jardins chose to explore the personal and professional lives of female scientists to reveal how they were able to make enormous scientific contributions. "The reason she discovered radium was because she was wanted to find a cure for cancer -- for humanity," said…