Caltech's Class of 2013 is a group of passionate, curious, and creative individuals who have spent their undergraduate years advancing research, challenging both conventional thinking and one another. They have thrived in a rigorous and unique academic environment, and built the kinds of skills in both leadership and partnership that will support them as they pursue their biggest and best ideas well into the future.

John Preskill, the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, is hooked on quanta. He was applying quantum theory to black holes back in 1994 when mathematician Peter Shor (BS '81), then at Bell Labs, showed that a quantum computer could factor a very large number in a very short time.

École Polytechnique and the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) signed an agreement to establish a master's education exchange program on March 5, 2013. This program allows selected students from both institutions to follow an intensive joint program in Aeronautics or Space Engineering, as well as Mechanics (both fluids and solids).

Donald Coles (MS '48, PhD '53), professor of aeronautics, emeritus, passed away on May 2. He was 89 years old.

Ringed by mountains and capped by a temperature inversion that traps bad air, Los Angeles has had bouts of smog since the turn of the 20th century. An outbreak in 1903 rendered the skies so dark that many people mistook it for a solar eclipse. Angelenos might now be living in a state of perpetual midnight—assuming we could live here at all—were it not for the work of Caltech Professor of Bio-organic Chemistry Arie Jan Haagen-Smit. How he did it is told here largely in his own words, excerpted from Caltech's Engineering & Science magazine between 1950 and 1962. (See "Related Links" for the original articles.)

The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) named Oscar P. Bruno, professor of applied and computational mathematics at Caltech, as a member of its 2013 Class of Fellows. Bruno is one of 33 fellows selected by SIAM for "exemplary research as well as outstanding service to the community," according to the organization. "Through their contributions, the 2013 Class of Fellows is helping advance the fields of applied mathematics and computational science," the organization stated in a March 29 press release.

Catherine Bingchan Xie, a senior bioengineering major and English minor at Caltech, has been selected to receive a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which will fund her graduate studies at the University of Cambridge for the next academic year. Xie, a Canadian citizen, is one of 51 new international recipients selected from a pool of more than 4,000 applicants based not only on intellectual ability, but also on leadership capacity and a commitment to improving the lives of others.

The mission: travel to one of Mars's two moons, explore its surface, collect some rocks, and return to Earth in one piece. Now plan it—in five days.

Dozens of students from Caltech and around the world converged on campus during the last week of March to do just that, compete in the Caltech Space Challenge, which pits two teams against each other to design the best manned space mission.

Engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working with a collaborator from the Jerusalem-based company LeukoDx, have developed a portable device to count white blood cells that needs less than a pinprick's worth of blood and takes just minutes to run.