Search
Planning for NASA’s 2020 Mars rover envisions a basic structure that capitalizes on the design and engineering work done for the NASA rover Curiosity, which landed on Mars in 2012, but with new science instruments selected through competition for accomplishing... More »
An artist’s view of Rosetta, the European Space Agency’s cometary probe with NASA contributions. Image credit: ESA Comets are among the most beautiful and least understood nomads of the night sky. To date, half a dozen of these most heavenly of heavenly bodies... More »
The magnitude 6.7 Northridge earthquake on Jan. 17, 1994, killed dozens, injured thousands and caused widespread damage throughout Greater Los Angeles. It was the costliest earthquake in U.S. history, and ranks as the fifth costliest disaster in U.S. history. ... More »
An artist’s concept portrays a NASA Mars Exploration Rover on the surface of Mars. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Cornell University The public is invited to share, either in person or online, in a 10-year anniversary event for the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER), Spiri... More »
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens has acquired an extensive collection of rare books and manuscripts by Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966), considered one of the greatest English prose satirists of the 20th century. The collectio... More »
Twenty years ago this week an earthquake struck Northridge, Calif., killing 57 people and revealing a serious defect in a common type of mid-rise building. A new study by U.S. Geological Survey and Caltech engineers, shows that these mid-rise buildings with fr... More »
Cloud plumes from cracks of open water in the Arctic sea ice cover. Image credit: University of Hamburg, Germany Vigorous mixing in the air above large cracks in Arctic sea ice that expose seawater to cold polar air pumps atmospheric mercury down to the surfa... More »
If you’ve ever slipped on a slimy wet rock at the beach, you have bacteria to thank. Those bacteria, nestled in a supportive extracellular matrix, form bacterial biofilms—often slimy substances that cling to wet surfaces. For some marine organisms—like cor... More »
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s official entry, RoboSimian, awaits the first event at the DARPA Robotics Challenge in December 2013. Also known as “Clyde,” the robot is four-footed but can also stand on two feet. It has four general-purpose limbs and hands cap... More »
Can you see the shape of a hand in this new X-ray image? The hand might look like an X-ray from the doctor’s office, but it is actually a cloud of material ejected from a star that exploded. NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, has imaged t... More »
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover and tracks left by its driving appear in this portion of a Dec. 11, 2013, observation by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of A... More »
John Bryson, former chairman and chief executive officer of Edison International (1990-2008), the parent company of Southern California Edison, has been reelected as a trustee of the California Institute of Technology. Bryson served on the Caltech Board of Tru... More »
