Applied physicists at the California Institute of Technology have devised a plasma experiment that shows how huge long, thin jets of material shoot out from exotic astrophysical objects such as young stars, black holes, and galactic nuclei.

Scott Chapman, from the California Institute of Technology, and Rodrigo Ibata, from the Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg in France, have led a team of astronomers in a project to map out the detailed motions of stars in the outskirts of the Andromeda galaxy. Their recent observations with the Keck telescopes show that the tenuous sprinkle of stars extending outward from the galaxy are actually part of the main disk itself.

Three members at the California Institute of Technology faculty and one former faculty who is now a visiting associate are among the 72 new members and 18 foreign associates being named to the National Academy of Sciences today. The election was announced during the 142nd annual meeting of the Academy in Washington, D.C.

Five faculty members at the California Institute of Technology are among this year's newly elected fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. They join 191 other Americans and 17 foreign honorees as the 225th class of fellows of the prestigious institution that was cofounded in 1780 by John Adams.

Kip Thorne, a physicist who is famed for his work on the cosmic consequences of relativity, is one of five winners of the 2005 Common Wealth Award.

Physicists at the California Institute of Technology have created the first nanodevices capable of weighing individual biological molecules. This technology may lead to new forms of molecular identification that are cheaper and faster than existing methods, as well as revolutionary new instruments for proteomics.

If all goes well with a technical study approved by NASA for this year, an innovative telescope should be orbiting Earth by the end of the decade and taking the first focused high-energy X-ray pictures of matter falling into black holes and shooting out of exploding stars. Not only will the telescope be 1,000 times more capable of finding new black holes than anything previously launched into space, but it will also give us an unprecedented look at the origins of the heavy elements we're all made of.

Robert Walker, a retired physics professor at the California Institute of Technology, died January 4 in New Mexico. A graduate student who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II, he was 85 years old at the time of his death.

Bose-Einstein condensates are enigmatic states of matter in which huge numbers of particles occupy the same quantum state and, for all intents and purposes, lose their individual identity. Predicted long ago by Albert Einstein and Satyendranath Bose, these bizarre condensates have recently become one of the hottest topics in physics research worldwide.

For the second consecutive year, the "High Energy Physics" team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers have won the Supercomputing Bandwidth Challenge with a sustained data transfer of 101 gigabits per second (Gbps) between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. This is more than four times faster than last year's record of 23.2 gigabits per second, which was set by the same team.