Caltech has long brought together masters from many fields to create the unimaginable. In the field of silicon photonics, in particular, the open and collaborative culture of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science has allowed for the assembly of an in... More »
People can reject food and control their thirst, but we cannot keep from falling asleep. Even though we spend a third of our lives asleep and treat the prevalence of sleep disorders, we know remarkably little about why we sleep or how sleep is regulated. On Fe... More »
A planet and a star are having a tumultuous romance that can be detected from 370 light-years away. JPL’s Spitzer Space Telescope has detected unusual pulsations in the outer shell of a star called HAT-P-2. Scientists’ best guess is that a closely orbiting pla... More »
Thought your Internet speeds were slow? Try being a space scientist for a day. The vast distances involved will throttle data rates to a trickle. You’re lucky if a spacecraft can send more than a few megabits per second (Mbps) — a pittance even by dial-up stan... More »
Chemical engineer and philanthropist Warren G. Schlinger (BS ’44, MS ’46, PhD ’49), a pioneer in the development of processes to produce clean energy from traditional fossil fuel sources, passed away on February 10, 2017. He was 93 years old. Schlinger was bor... More »
Shrinivas (Shri) Kulkarni, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science and director of Caltech’s Optical Observatories, has been awarded the 2017 Dan David Prize, along with the late Neil Gehrels (PhD ’82) of NASA’s Godd... More »
The Louisiana coastline is sinking under the Gulf of Mexico at the rate of about one football field of land every hour (about 18 square miles of land lost in a year). But within this sinking region, two river deltas are growing. The Atchafalaya River and its d... More »
Mars scientists are wrestling with a problem. Ample evidence says ancient Mars was sometimes wet, with water flowing and pooling on the planet’s surface. Yet, the ancient sun was about one-third less warm and climate modelers struggle to produce scenarios that... More »
Bats have long captured the imaginations of scientists and engineers with their unrivaled agility, but their complex wing motions pose significant technological challenges for those seeking to recreate their flight in a robot. The key flight mechanisms of bats... More »
For proteins, this would be the equivalent of the red-carpet treatment: each protein belonging to the complex machinery of ribosomes — components of the cell that produce proteins — has its own chaperone to guide it to the right place at the right time and pro... More »
Harold Rosen (MS ’48, PhD ’51), the father of geostationary satellite communications, passed away on January 30, 2017. He was 90. Modern communications technology relies on a fleet of hundreds of satellites orbiting in fixed locations above the earth’s surface... More »
Kaiser Permanente researchers in Pasadena say children exposed to complications before or during birth were more likely to develop autism spectrum disorder (ASD) than those who did not experience perinatal complications. In a study published Tuesday in the Ame... More »
