Latest News | Caltech

05/20/2013

Decision Making and Quality Control in Early Moments of a Protein’s Life

Douglas Smith

Professor of Chemistry Shu-ou Shan studies the gears and springs in the molecular machinery of life. She’ll be giving us a guided tour of the cellular assembly line at 8 p.m. on Wednesday, May 22, 2013 in Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium. Admission is free.

02/05/2013

Viewing the Cosmos from the South Pole: An Interview with Jamie Bock

Marcus Woo

Almost immediately after the Big Bang—roughly after ten trillionths of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second—the universe suddenly grew. Very fast.

02/04/2013

Caltech Senior Wins Churchill Scholarship

Kimm Fesenmaier

Caltech senior Andrew Meng has been selected to receive a Churchill Scholarship, which will fund his graduate studies at the University of Cambridge for the next academic year. Meng, a chemistry and physics major, was one of only 14 students nationwide who were chosen to receive the fellowship this year.

01/31/2013

Arnold Awarded National Medal of Technology and Innovation

Kathy Svitil

Frances H. Arnold, a leader in the field of protein engineering and a member of the faculty at Caltech, was one of 11 inventors to be awarded the 2011 National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

01/31/2013

Jorgensen Laboratory Awarded LEED Platinum Certification

Katie Neith

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.

01/30/2013

Sorting Out Stroking Sensations

Katie Neith

The skin is a human being's largest sensory organ, helping to distinguish between a pleasant contact, like a caress, and a negative sensation, like a pinch or a burn. Previous studies have shown that these sensations are carried to the brain by different types of sensory neurons that have nerve endings in the skin. Only a few of those neuron types have been identified, however, and most of those detect painful stimuli. Now biologists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have identified in mice a specific class of skin sensory neurons that reacts to an apparently pleasurable stimulus.

01/26/2013

For Love or Money: Marriage and Economic Development in the Past

Douglas Smith

Getting married and moving out of your parents' house may be key to your personal economic development, but are marriage patterns key to an entire society's development as well? Professor of Social Science History Tracy Dennison tells us what love's got to do with it at 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 30, 2013, in Caltech's Beckman Auditorium. Admission is free.

01/22/2013

Notes from the Back Row: "Engineering with Impact"

Douglas Smith

If you hit something hard enough, it will break, and the consequences can be catastrophic.

01/17/2013

TEDxCaltech: Advancing Humanoid Robots

Katie Neith

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

01/14/2013

TEDxCaltech: If You Click a Cookie with a Mouse

Marcus Woo

When offered spinach or a cookie, how do you decide which to eat? Do you go for the healthy choice or the tasty one? To study the science of decision making, researchers in the lab of Caltech neuroeconomist Antonio Rangel analyze what happens inside people's brains as they choose between various kinds of food. The researchers typically use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the changes in oxygen flow through the brain; these changes serve as proxies for spikes or dips in brain activity. Recently, however, investigators have started using a new technique that may better tease out how you choose between the spinach or the cookie—a decision that's often made in a fraction of a second.

01/14/2013

Research Update: Atomic Motions Help Determine Temperatures Inside Earth

Katie Neith

In December 2011, Caltech mineral-physics expert Jennifer Jackson reported that she and a team of researchers had used diamond-anvil cells to compress tiny samples of iron—the main element of the earth's core. By squeezing the samples to reproduce the extreme pressures felt at the core, the team was able to get a closer estimate of the melting point of iron. At the time, the measurements that the researchers made were unprecedented in detail. Now, they have taken that research one step further by adding infrared laser beams to the mix.