The recent renovations of the Jorgensen Laboratory included many upgrades that were designed to reflect Caltech's commitment to sustainability. Now the building has achieved LEED Platinum certification, the highest honor of the U.S. Green Building Council.

When Matanya Horowitz started his undergraduate work in 2006 at University of Colorado at Boulder, he knew that he wanted to work in robotics—mostly because he was disappointed that technology had not yet made good on his sci-fi–inspired dreams of humanoid robots. "The best thing we had at the time was the Roomba, which is a great product, but compared to science fiction it seemed really diminutive," says Horowitz. He therefore decided to major in not just electrical engineering, but also economics, applied math, and computer science. "I thought that the answer to better robots would lie somewhere in the middle of these different subjects, and that maybe each one held a different key," he explains. Now a doctoral student at Caltech—he earned his masters in the same four years as his multiple undergrad degrees—Horowitz is putting his range of academic experience to work in the labs of engineers Joel Burdick and John Doyle to help advance robotics and intelligent systems

As technology advances, it tends to shrink. From cell phones to laptops—powered by increasingly faster and tinier processors—everything is getting thinner and sleeker. And now light beams are getting smaller, too. Engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a device that can focus light into a point just a few nanometers (billionths of a meter) across—an achievement they say may lead to next-generation applications in computing, communications, and imaging.