Forget problem sets and exams. For their homework and final assignments, students in Caltech's Aerospace Engineering course work on a proposed space mission.

The Society for Experimental Mechanics (SEM) has selected Caltech's Ares Rosakis as the recipient of the P.S. Theocaris Award.

Caltech researchers have been able, for the first time, to watch viruses infecting individual bacteria by transferring their DNA, and to measure the rate at which that transfer occurs. Shedding light on the early stages of infection by this type of virus—a bacteriophage—the scientists have determined that it is the cells targeted for infection, rather than the amount of genetic material within the viruses themselves, that dictate how quickly the bacteriophage's DNA is transferred.

Imagine if doctors could perform surgery without ever having to cut through your skin. Or if they could diagnose cancer by seeing tumors inside the body with a procedure that is as simple as an ultrasound. Thanks to a technique developed by engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), all of that may be possible in the not-so-distant future.

After designing and building a four-wheeled remotely controlled rover, a team of Caltech students came away with second place in the RASC-AL Exploration Robo-Ops Competition at NASA's Johnson Space Center earlier this month. 

When Caltech senior Arvind Kannan graduates on Friday, he will be one highly decorated Techer. During this academic year, the chemical engineering major racked up multiple honors that will support his graduate studies, including a Churchill Scholarship, a Hertz Foundation fellowship, and a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship.

A rover designed and built by Caltech undergraduate students will compete later this week in the RASC-AL Explorational Robo-Ops Competition at NASA's Johnson Space Center. The four-wheeled robot will be controlled by a group of students who will be located back on campus, in the basement of Spalding Laboratory.

When scientists think about the replication of information in chemistry, they usually have in mind something akin to what happens in living organisms when DNA gets copied: a double-stranded molecule that contains sequence information makes two new copies of the molecule. But researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have now shown that a different mechanism can also be used to copy sequence information. 

Caltech engineers and applied scientists are poking, prodding, and modeling materials on all scales to develop the understanding needed to build the next generation of armor. As part of a newly-funded Army collaboration, six Caltech researchers will investigate what happens to protective materials during intense impact.