Donald Earl Coles (MS '48, PhD '53), professor of aeronautics, emeritus, passed away on May 2 at age 89. Coles was a master instrument builder famed for his ingeniously designed and precisely executed experiments. His doctoral dissertation provided the first comprehensive set of data on supersonic boundary layers.

Los Angeles has had bouts of smog since the turn of the 20th century. 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 Arie Jan Haagen-Smit.

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 next year.

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 recently to do just that.

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.

Francis H. Clauser (BS '34, MS '35, PhD '37), the Clark Blanchard Millikan Professor of Engineering, Emeritus, passed away on March 3, 2013, at age 99. Born in the decade following the Wright Brothers' first powered flight, he was a founder of modern aeronautics and helped usher in the Space Age.

A team of Caltech engineers, for the first time ever, has developed electronic chips that repair themselves.