As reported in the Aug. 7 issue of the journal Nature, Beckman Institute's John Rogers and his collaborators have developed a high-performance, hemispherical "eye" camera using an array of single-crystalline silicon detectors and electronics, configured in a stretchable, interconnected mesh. The work opens new possibilities for advanced camera design. It also foreshadows artificial retinas for bionic eyes similar in concept to those in the movie "Terminator" and other popular science fiction.

Beckman Institute researcher Albert Feng and his collaborators have discovered that a frog that lives near noisy springs in central China can tune its ears to different sound frequencies, much like the tuner on a radio can shift from one frequency to another. It is the only known example of an animal that can actively select what frequencies it hears, the researchers say.

David Clayton of the NeuroTech group is leading an effort to sequence the genome of the zebra finch songbird, an animal that has intriguing stories to tell neuroscience researchers like Clayton.