California Institute of Technology

On July 1, high-school students in the Caltech Young Engineering and Science Scholars program, a three-week summer residential program, took part in a catapult design competition as part of a physics course. Small teams of students each designed, built, and presented a catapult to pro...

Kent Kresa, interim chairman of General Motors, and his wife have pledged $2 million to Caltech to endow the Joyce and Kent Kresa Professorship in Engineering and Applied Science. Kresa is chairman of the Caltech Board of Trustees. The Kresa gift is matched with an additional $1 million pr...

This summer, the Athenaeum is offering complimentary 30-day membership passes for current nonmembers who are Caltech, JPL, or Huntington Library employees eligible to join as members and interested in trying the experience. The passes will provide the opportunity to enjoy the Athen...

This fall, up to 10 Pasadena City College students will work with stem cells at Caltech, thanks to a $1.7 million grant and the leadership of a former Caltech postdoc. Others will follow in 2010 and 2011. Upon completing the program, they will be fully prepped to work on the frontiers of biomed...

From June 28 to 30, Caltech is hosting the 13th Annual President's Meeting of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities (APRU), a consortium of 42 leading research universities. The leaders of APRU member universities meet each year to reflect on issues relating to higher education a...

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) isn't scheduled to restart for a few months, but Caltech professors Harvey Newman and Maria Spiropulu are now busy working with their high-energy physics team to discover mysterious Higgs particles, supersymmetry, gravitons, and other exotic forms o...

By Tom Oppy's view of a baby crater on Mars. Click for larger. Credit for image: Opportunity Rover, portion of Navcam mosaic (Sol 1825; PIA 1185). Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Credit for image: Opportunity Rover, portion of Navcam mosaic (Sol 1825; PIA 1185). Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

650 undergraduates from around the world are conducting diverse scientific research projects at Caltech as part of the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) program. Now in its 32nd year, the Caltech SURF program offers undergraduates the opportunity to conduct indepen...

The Einstein Papers Project, located at and supported by Caltech, is one of the most ambitious publishing ventures ever undertaken in the documentation of the history of science. The project involves sorting through over 70,000 documents and publishing The Collected Papers of Albert...

PASADENA, Calif.—By squeezing a typical metal alloy at pressures hundreds of thousands of times greater than normal atmospheric pressure, scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a material that does not expand when ...

 CA Caltech has raked in oodles of Nobel Prizes. Its operation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has sent its renown beyond Earth. And its students have pulled off both brilliant research and inspired pranks. The long-ago dismantling of a Model T and the ...

By daveshields I have yet to meet a Google employee who would have survived the freshman year at Caltech in the early 60’s. Less than 2/3 of my class graduated. The next class, ‘67, had an even higher attrition rate, so much so that Caltech dropped freshman grades.

A group of Caltech undergrads has proposed an innovative plan to reduce energy consumption on campus. In what started as a term project to analyze a new technology for Professor Ken Pickar's Management of Technology course, the Caltech Behavior Energy Initiative discovered solutions...

 DC Credit: (top left) University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy; (top right): A. Dupree (CfA)/NASA/ESA; (bottom) NASA/JPL-Caltech/SV Ramírez (NExSci/Caltech)/SST/IRAC/MIPS/IRS By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee PASADENA, CALIFORNIA--Stars have been the, well, ...

 FL Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/E. Churchwell (Univ. of Wisconsin) Located near the Aquila rift in the Galactic plane at a distance of 23000 light-years, this cloud condensation has a mass 120 times that of the Sun contained within a volume smaller than the ...

 MA Yes, that's right, Caltech researchers were 3 times as productive as their counterparts at MIT and Harvard, and 10 times as productive as those at Michigan ;-) Graham and Diamond's results establish that reputation is often a misleading indicator. ...

By Steve Hsu(noreply@blogger.com) I've been fascinated by economist <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_L._Smith">Vernon Smith</a> since participating in paid economics experiments as a student at Caltech. Smith was the pioneer in this type of research. From the 2002 Nobel <a href="http:...

By Tom Stuck Rover The Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is stuck in the soft soil near “Home Plate” — this is not good obviously but it’s worse than that.  Not only is the rover stuck there is a possibility it is “high centered” on a mound of rocks under its belly.  To add insult to injury, a left [...]

For decades of breakthroughs in bioinorganic and inorganic photochemistry powering his current work in renewable fuels, Harry Gray, the Beckman Professor of Chemistry and founding director of the Beckman Institute at Caltech, has been named the recipient of the 2009 Welch Award in C...

 CA Caltech and Pomona College have nominated Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) for the National CASE Award (Council for the Advancement and Support of Education). Since its founding in Los Angeles in 1958, ARCS has grown into 14 chapters ...

At Caltech in Pasadena tonight through Sunday, the Capitol Steps will perform 30 songs and skits, including "Joe Biden" belting out rock, "Vladimir Putin" warbling a show tune and the "Supreme Court" digging disco. Newport said that Pasadena is one of ...

But Caltech's most prominent use as an onscreen venue began four years ago, when it became a central location for the CBS series "Numbers" — even though the Pasadena campus was not the first choice. "Numbers" was originally to be set in Boston, ...

 TX Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Image 2: This image is a blend of the Galaxy Evolution Explorer's M33 image and another taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. M33, one of our closest galactic neighbors, is about 2.9 million light-years away in the ...

The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation has selected two Caltech students as recipients of 200910 Hertz Fellowships. Chosen from a pool of 543 applicants, Amit Lakhanpal, a graduate student in biology, and Po-Ling Loh, a senior in applied mathematics, are among 10 fellowships awarded thi...

Caltech will once again award the Thomas W. Schmitt Annual Staff Prize to a Caltech staff member at this year's Service Award Ceremony on June 2. The prize was established to recognize staff members whose contributions to the Institute embody the values and spirit that enable Caltech to be...

By daveshields Prof. diPrima was the first person I met who was also a member of NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (CIMS), then and now the world’s foremost school of applied mathematics. o - o - o Professor Herbert “Herb” Keller - May His Memory Be a Blessing. o - o - o - o

The Beavers may not be competing in the ongoing NCAA March Madness tournament, but you can still catch them on TV. Quantum Hoops, the documentary about the Caltech men's basketball team, will be broadcast on KCET on Saturday, April 4, at 10 p.m., an again on Sunday, April 5, at 3:30 p.m. Since its...

By Tom Spitzer and Hubble team up to view the galactic collision that is NGC 6240. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI-ESA This image was created from combined data from the infrared array camera of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope at 3.6 and 8.0 microns (red) and visible light from NASA’s Hubble Spac...

At 4 to 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 26 in Beckman Laboratory, Room 24, Caltech Library Services will present a talk by Harvard's Stuart M. Shieber, professor of computer science, and director of the Office for Scholarly Communication. In a talk called "The Harvard Initiatives for Open Acce...

Three graduate students and a professor from Caltech's Tectonics Observatory presented hands-on activities in Earth science at Sierra Madre Middle School's Science and Math Fair on February 18. About 70 of the school's sixth graders, along with their families, attended the event, at...

By Michael A paper describing these breakthrough metallic-glass alloys is now online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Early Edition in advance of an upcoming print publication. Earlier this year, the same Caltech group had published a paper in the journal Nature, des...

The Pleiades star cluster, captured here in infrared by the Spitzer Space Telescope. Click on image to view slideshow. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/J. Stauffer (SSC/Caltech). IYA2009 In the UK, the Society for Popular Astronomy, Royal Astronomical Society and Science and Technology Faci...

By Michael We were able to follow the whole process," adds Scott Fraser, the Anna L. Rosen Professor of Biology, director of the Beckman Institute's Biological Imaging Center, and a paper coauthor. "We were able to label and watch the cells doing the motion, and the events that guide the motion."

Caltech scientists have built an electron microscope that, like a video camera, can film events over short periods of time to provide a glimpse into various mechanisms happening at the nano scale. Press release: Caltech 4D Microscope Revolutionizes the Way We Look at the Nano World ...

By Sean So to all those grad students hanging around in the lounge, trying to say clever things to impress the visiting speaker — it could be worse! You could be hanging around soda shops, hoping to be discovered by wandering tenured professors.

By Tom This painterly portrait of a star-forming cloud, called NGC 346, is a combination of multiwavelength light from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared), the European Southern Observatory’s New Technology Telescope (visible), and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton space t...

By clementlawyer After nearly 30 years at Caltech as a professor of theoretical physics and, eventually, provost, Steven Koonin took a leave of absence in 2004 to become BP's chief scientist. After a year of study, he recommended a strategy for the company that has included investments in unconventional...

We are not the first to make DNA tubes with controlled circumferences. However, compared with previous approaches, our method is distinctively simple and modular," says Yin. The simplicity and modularity of their approach permits the description of the tube design using a simple graph...

At this year's Staff Service and Award Ceremony, Caltech honored over 200 staff members for service ranging from 10 to 40 years, and President Chameau announced Teesa Chmielewski and Dana Roth as the winners of the 2008 Thomas W. Schmitt Annual Staff Prize. The award recognizes staff memb...

By Tom NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver, is the prime contractor for the project and buil...

By daveshields Some knocks are so loud there is no question you will open the door and take advantage of them . For example, as I was nearing the end of my senior year in high school, I knew I would attend either the University of New Mexico or Caltech, and that I would only be going to Caltech if they provided som...

Scientists from the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles, reported the development in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. The latest development, Reynolds said, shows development progressing from research into something manufactu...

Caltech's first woman to win a Marshall Scholarship, Emma Schmidgall is making a little history, but it's a place where she feels right at home. "I've been to Cambridge before," she says. "It's like something out of 'Harry Potter.'" Schmidgall's Cambridge connection began last year, when...

PASADENA - Caltech undergraduate Dvin Adalian was feeling restless. With his friend Ricky Jones, he considered all manner of interesting distractions. In the end, inspiration lay just outside the door. Caltech is dotted with olive trees - trees, they noticed, with fruit just beginning t...

A new $4.4-million grant from the National Science Foundation will allow researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, to develop techniques to turn brain cells on and off in animals as they go about their daily activities, allowing...

 CA - Apr 3, 2006 Wilson Observatory and Caltech being nearby, it was natural for the Star ... sum of which may possibly give the experimenters a method of forecasting earthquakes.".

the 1st sandman writes "SC2005 published some results of several challenges including bandwidth utilization. The winner (a Caltech led team of several institutes) was measured at 130 Gbps. On their site you can find some more information on their measurements...

Dr. Richard Wiseman, head of the psychology lab at the University of Hertfordshire, will give a Skeptics Society lecture entitled "Luck, ESP, and Magic: How Science Tests the Unusual." This specially scheduled talk will take place at 7 p.m. on November 9, in Baxter Lecture Hall. Donation is $...

You are invited to attend a short presentation by a United Way representative and the directors of the Caltech Y, Caltech Children's Center, and Child Educational Center at JPL, who will describe their organizations and tell how they assist the community. Caltech will match, dollar for...

Faces of Science: Photographs by Mariana Cook will be on exhibit at the Caltech Bookstore from October 19 through November 23. In her book, renowned photographer Mariana Cook turned her camera on some of the greatest men and women of the scientific community to take an intimate look at the...