PASADENA, Calif. — In trying to predict where earthquakes will occur, few people would think to look at Earth's gravity field.

According to conventional wisdom, hydrogen-fueled cars are environmentally friendly because they emit only water vapor -- a naturally abundant atmospheric gas. But leakage of the hydrogen gas that can fuel such cars could cause problems for the upper atmosphere, new research shows.

In an article appearing this week in the journal Science, researchers from the California Institute of Technology report that the leaked hydrogen gas that would inevitably result from a hydrogen economy, if it accumulates, could indirectly cause as much as a 10-percent decrease in atmospheric ozone.

PASADENA, Calif. - Dave Stevenson has spent his career working on "swing-by" missions to the other planets. Now he has a modest proposal he'd like to swing by some government agency with a few billion dollars in available funding.

According to Stevenson's calculations, it should be possible to send a probe all the way to Earth's core by combining several proven technologies with a few well-grounded scientific assumptions about the workings of the planet.

PASADENA, Calif. — The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has elected three California Institute of Technology faculty members as academy fellows. They are Fred C. Anson, Elizabeth Gilloon Professor of Chemistry, Emeritus; Joseph L. Kirschvink, professor of geobiology; and Colin F. Camerer, Rea A. and Lela G. Axline Professor of Business Economics.

The 2003 class of 187 fellows and 29 foreign honorary members includes four college presidents, three Nobel laureates, and four Pulitzer Prize winners.

Six Caltech professors recently received Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowships for 2003.

Barclay Kamb and Hermann Engelhardt, longtime researchers on the workings of the Antarctic ice streams, have been honored by the American Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names (ACAN) with the renaming of two features near the gigantic Ross Ice Shelf, a Texas-sized mass of floating ice.

Reporting in the February 14 issue of the journal Science, Caltech planetary science professor Andy Ingersoll and his graduate student, Shane Byrne, present evidence that the decades-old model of the polar caps being made of dry ice is in error.

Teams of astronomers at the California Institute of Technology and at the University of California, Berkeley, have discovered methane clouds near the south pole of Titan, resolving a fierce debate about whether clouds exist amid the haze of the moon's atmosphere.

The new observations were made using the W. M. Keck II 10-meter and the Gemini North 8-meter telescopes atop Hawaii's Mauna Kea volcano in December 2001. Both telescopes are outfitted with adaptive optics that provide unprecedented detail of features not seen even by the Voyager spacecraft during its flyby of Saturn and Titan.

In the last few years, researchers have discovered more than 500 objects in the Kuiper belt, a gigantic outer ring in the outskirts of the solar system, beyond the orbit of Neptune. Of these, seven so far have turned out to be binaries--two objects that orbit each other. The surprise is that these binaries all seem to be pairs of widely separated objects of similar size. This is surprising because more familiar pairings, such as the Earth/moon system, tend to be unequal in size and/or rather close together.

By analyzing stalagmites from caves in Sarawak, which is the Malaysian section of Borneo and the location of one of the world's oldest rain forests, and by studying deep-sea corals from the North Atlantic Ocean, California Institute of Technology researcher Jess Adkins will explore the vital link between the deep ocean, the atmosphere, and abrupt changes in global climates.