For Andrew Thompson, assistant professor of environmental science and engineering who joined GPS in August, growing up in Rhode Island gave him a natural affinity for the ocean. Now, he studies physical ocean science, focusing on eddies. While Thompson studies the way sea storms move things around, new faculty member and alum Victor Tsai, assistant professor of geophysics, is busy measuring the seismic noise produced by the movements of the ocean—partly from the crashing of waves onto the shore.

A joint team of students from Caltech and the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) are working 60-plus-hour weeks this summer to complete construction of a state-of-the-art, energy-efficient house for the Solar Decathlon, a biennial competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that will be held from September 23 to October 2 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. 

The world is taking note of the innovative work being done at Caltech—not just in the labs, but also in the unique renovations of our research spaces. The spring issue of Solutions Journal, a magazine of the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), features an in-depth profile of the Linde + Robinson Laboratory, an astronomy facility built in 1932 that has undergone extensive renovations and will be the nation's first LEED Platinum laboratory.

When geologists survey an area of land for the potential that gas or petroleum deposits could exist there, they must take into account the composition of rocks that lie below the surface. Previous research had suggested that compaction bands might act as barriers to the flow of oil or gas. Now, researchers led by José Andrade have analyzed X-ray images of Aztec sandstone and revealed that compaction bands are actually more permeable than earlier models indicated.