California Institute of Technology

When the Spitzer Space Telescope (n SIRTF) roared into space aboard a Delta rocket in August 2003, intensive preparations for its mission had already been under way for nearly two years at the telescope's science center. The center's opening in 2001 on the Caltech campus marked the lates...

A pensive David Krumholtz (left) and Judd Hirsch, who play son and father on the long-running CBS TV series Numb3rs, take a break from location shooting outside Caltech's Dabney Hall on January 26. In the show, which frequently shoots at Caltech, Krumholtz plays Charlie Eppes, a brillia...

By Nancy Atkinson Well, that didn't take long: The WISE spacecraft (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) spotted its first near-Earth asteroid on January 12, 2010, two days before the official start of its all-sky survey. That's a pretty good catch, considering WISE just popped it lens cover a couple of...

Dr. Andrew Lange, the Marvin L. Goldberger Professor of Physics at Caltech, passed away Friday, January 22, 2010. Lange had been at Caltech since 1993. He graduated from Princeton University with his BA in 1980 and received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1987. He first came to the Institute as a vis...

By webmaster FRAUD IN SCIENCE is not as easy to identify as one might think. When accusations of scientific misconduct occur, truth can often be elusive, and the cause of a scientist’s ethical misstep isn’t always clear. In his lecture based on his new book, On Fact and Fraud, Caltech physicist David Goo...

By webmaster Beckman Auditorium Sunday, February 28, 2010 at 2 pm Come early for our $5–$10 book sale! Beckman Auditorium Sunday, March 14, 2010 at 2 pm On Fact & Fraud: Cautionary Tales from the Front Lines of Science with Dr. David Goodstein

This year's celebration of King Day on January 18 marks the 52nd anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s visit to Caltech in March 1958, when he spent three days on campus under the auspices of the Caltech YMCA (today the Caltech Y) Leaders of America series. King, then 29, took part in seve...

How many presidents has Caltech had? It all depends on how you factor in the unique perspective of the university's first leader, Robert A. Millikan, who always referred to himself as head of the Institute's executive council. (Most Techers privately called him "the chief.") What is indis...

Caltech Jazz Bands, directed by William Bing, will kick off their new year with Latin jazz, at 8 pm Jan. 30 in Caltech's Beckman Auditorium, ...

Caltech researchers revise long-held theory of fruit-fly development press release) PASADENA, Calif.—For decades, science texts have told a simple and straightforward story about a particular protein—a transcription factor—that helps the ... and more »

By webmaster Over 60 years later, Freeman learned that Fa’apua’a was still alive and well. In 1987 she was interviewed for the documentary film Margaret Mead and Samoa. In that interview, she testified that Mead had asked her and Fofoa embarrassing questions about what they did at night. In response, th...

A group of Caltech staff members plunged early into the holiday gift-giving season this month when they decided to pool their resources and help create a scholarship in the Institute's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) program. The 10 administrative assistants in Dev...

It's a great medium, because you don't want a TV show to become didactic," says Caltech professor Sean Carroll, who is teaching Introductory Physics of ... and more »

Berkeley Lab and Caltech's Astronomy Department agreed that we would split the work, the Lab handling the Type Ia's and Caltech all the other types. ... and more »

Caltech scientists show how ubiquitin chains are added to cell-cycle proteins press release) PASADENA, Calif.—Researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have been able to view in detail, and for the first time, the previously ... and more »

PhysOrg.com Spitzer Telescope Observes Baby Brown Dwarf press release) One of the astronomers' stops was the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory in Hawaii, which captured the presence of the envelope around the young objects. ... Spitzer telescope observes youngest brown dwarfZee News

By webmaster In this Skeptics Distinguished Lecture Series talk at Caltech from 1999, three science biographers take an illuminating look back over the life and legacy of one of the 20th Century’s most celebrated astronomers. First, Michael Shermer analyzes Carl Sagan’s career to test common clai...

For the fourth year in a row, Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine has ranked Caltech as the best value among private universities in the United States. According to an article in the December issue, "Caltech students enjoy the ultimate in academic nurturing: a student-faculty ratio...

By Steve Hsu(noreply@blogger.com) These observations are consistent with my own experience. Growing up in Iowa, I remember many academically talented students from my high school (often children of professors) simply attending the local state university by default. These days, those same kids would be angling for admi...

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a remote-controlled robot that is able to simulate the "visual" experience of a blind person who has been implanted with a visual prosthesis, such as an artificial retina. An artificial retina consists of a si...

By Tom Details and scientific interpretation of these new impact craters and their use to examine subsurface ice at northern mid-latitudes on Mars are captured in a paper published this week in Science by Shane Byrne and 17 colleagues on teams operating the Contect Camera, High Resolution Im...

By webmaster References ^ Cannon, Debby. “The Impact of the Hospitality & Tourism Industry on Atlanta.” (Atlanta: J. Mack Robinson College of Business.) Retrieved September 14, 2009.^ Read the Dragon*Con Pocket Program . (PDF) Recent Caltech lectures now on DVD For those of you who don’t live in Cali...

By webmaster the Fall/Winter Season of Caltech Lectures Mark your calendar! The Skeptics Society is pleased to announce its Fall/Winter season of the Skeptics Distinguished Lecture Series at Caltech. This continues the seventeen-year-long series, presenting over 200 lectures by some of the mos...

In the latest U.S. News & World Report America's Best Colleges survey, Caltech ranks number four as one of the nation's best universities. Caltech also maintained its number four ranking as one of the top undergraduate engineering programs in the country. Highlights in this year's sur...

PhysOrg.com) -- Inside a mountain range in central Italy, Columbia researchers are trying to solve one of the most pressing questions in modern physics: What is dark matter? The riddle has obsessed astronomers and physicists since the 1930s, when Caltech professor Fritz Zwicky first p...

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced a first-of-its-kind partnership between the City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP), JPL, and Caltech to establish Los Angeles as "a powerhouse for demonstrated energy and water innovation." This part...

 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, ...

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 [...]

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...

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...

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...

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...