An argon plasma jet forms a rapidly growing corkscrew, known as a kink instability. This instability causes an even faster-developing behavior called a Rayleigh-Taylor instability, in which ripples grow and tear the jet apart. This phenomenon, the Caltech re... More »
Caltech senior Arvind Kannan has been selected to receive a Churchill Scholarship, which will fund his graduate studies at the University of Cambridge for the next academic year. Kannan, a chemical engineering major and English minor, was one of only 14 studen... More »
From left to right: Christian Ott, Sarah Reisman, John Johnson, Theodor Agapie, and Yi Ni. Five Caltech assistant professors have been chosen as recipients of Sloan Research Fellowships for 2012. Awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a not-for-profit gran... More »
Researchers have built the first model that depicts precisely how chemoreceptors and the proteins around them are structured at the sensing tip of bacteria. The architecture, showing trimers of receptor dimers in purple, is based on ECT data (background) and n... More »
Art and science come together as Magician Bob Friedhoffer performs one feat after another, and proves that our senses can truly be fooled. Obvious, but amazing, tricks our mind plays on us are revealed. Friedhoffer answers questions, such as: how are people ... More »
Astronomers using data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have, for the first time, discovered buckyballs in a solid form in space. Prior to this discovery, the microscopic carbon spheres had been found only in gas form in the cosmos. Formally named buckminis... More »
David Tirrell, the Ross McCollum-William H. Corcoran Professor and professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at Caltech, has been appointed director of the Beckman Institute. He succeeds biologist Barbara Wold, who has returned to full-time professorial ... More »
The south pole of the giant asteroid Vesta, as imaged by the framing camera on NASA’s Dawn spacecraft in September 2011. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA Though generally thought to be quite dry, roughly half of the giant asteroid Vesta is expec... More »
This enhanced-color image shows sand dunes trapped in an impact crater in Noachis Terra, Mars. [Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona] Some images of stark Martian landscapes provide visual appeal beyond their science value, including a recent sce... More »
NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, mission is seen here being lowered into its shipping container at Orbital Sciences Corporation in Dulles, Va. The spacecraft is headed to Vandenberg Air Force Base in Central California, where it will be... More »
Alexander Varshavsky, Caltech’s Howard and Gwen Laurie Smits Professor of Cell Biology, has been awarded the 2012 King Faisal International Prize (KFIP) for Science. The winners of the prize, which also includes awards for medicine, Arabic language and literat... More »
This mosaic of images taken in mid-January 2012 shows the windswept vista northward (left) to northeastward (right) from the location where NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is spending its fifth Martian winter, an outcrop informally named “Greeley Hav... More »
