“Oh, I just forgot what I was going to say!” “Now what was I getting ready to do?” “Where did I put my keys?” For many of us, these exasperating complaints are all too common. And for others facing even more debilitating memory disorders like Alzheimer’s or de... More »
Three years ago, the concept for Open Studios Tour was born out of a coffee conversation and love of art. Mary Gothard and her husband had hosted a lively open studio at their Altadena home for 10 years and, in 2013, partnered with Ginko Ching Lee to expand th... More »
Catapults, conveyor belts and vacuums were among the many innovative devices built by students for the 2016 Invention Challenge, an annual engineering competition hosted at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. The event was designed to inspi... More »
Many self-organized systems in nature exploit a sophisticated blend of deterministic and random processes. No two trees are exactly alike because growth is random, but a Redwood can be readily distinguished from a Jacaranda as the two species follow different ... More »
Throw a baseball, and you might say it’s all in the wrist. For robots, it’s all in the gears. Gears are essential for precision robotics. They allow limbs to turn smoothly and stop on command; low-quality gears cause limbs to jerk or shake. If you’re designing... More »
One of the greatest mysteries of experimental physics is how so-called high-temperature superconducting materials work. Despite their name, high-temperature superconductors—materials that carry electrical current with no resistance—operate at chilly temperatur... More »
A new study is the first to show that living organisms can be persuaded to make silicon-carbon bonds—something only chemists had done before. Scientists at Caltech “bred” a bacterial protein to have the ability to make the man-made bonds, a finding that h... More »
Caltech senior trustee Charles Trimble (BS ’63, MS ’64), founder and former chief executive officer of Trimble Navigation, Ltd., is the 2016 recipient of the International von Kármán Wings Award. The honor—administered by the Aerospace Historical Society and t... More »
Researchers from Caltech and UCLA have developed a new approach to removing cellular damage that accumulates with age. The technique can potentially help slow or reverse an important cause of aging. Led by Nikolay Kandul, senior postdoctoral scholar in biology... More »
Cool a material to sufficiently low temperatures and it will seek some form of collective order. Add quantum mechanics or confine the geometry and the states of matter that emerge can be exotic, including electrons whose spins arrange themselves in spirals, pi... More »
Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are mysterious flashes of radio waves originating outside our Milky Way galaxy. A team of scientists, jointly led by Caltech postdoctoral scholar Vikram Ravi and Curtin University research fellow Ryan Shannon, has now observed the m... More »
The Pasadena-based Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO) today announced the appointment of Walter E. Massey, PhD, and Taft Armandroff, PhD, to the positions of Board Chair and Vice Chair, respectively. Continuing their involvement in new leadership cap... More »
