Astrophysicists have had an exceedingly difficult time charting the mysterious stuff called dark matter that permeates the universe because it's--well--dark. Now, a unique "mass map" of a cluster of galaxies shows in unprecedented detail how dark matter is distributed with respect to the shining galaxies.

Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have set a new Internet2 land speed record using the next-generation Internet protocol IPv6. The team sustained a single stream TCP rate of 983 megabits per second for more than one hour between the CERN facility in Geneva and Chicago, a distance of more than 7,000 kilometers. This is equivalent to transferring a full CD in 5.6 seconds.

The performance is remarkable because it overcomes two important challenges:

For the first time, the planets orbiting a pulsar have been "weighed" by measuring precisely variations in the time it takes them to complete an orbit, according to a team of astronomers from the California Institute of Technology and Pennsylvania State University.

Reporting at the summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Caltech postdoctoral researcher Maciej Konacki and Penn State astronomy professor Alex Wolszczan announced today that masses of two of the three known planets orbiting a rapidly spinning pulsar 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Virgo have been success

PASADENA, Calif. — The California Science Center has announced the joint selection of Andrew Lange and Saul Perlmutter as 2003 California Scientist of the Year.

Lange is Marvin L. Goldberger Professor of Physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and Perlmutter is senior scientist and group leader at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley. Using two very different techniques, Lange and Perlmutter's experimental efforts have confirmed a remarkable theory of how the universe expanded and evolved after the "big bang."

Shrinivas Kulkarni, who is the MacArthur Professor of Astronomy and Planetary Science at the California Institute of Technology, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

New distance measurements from faraway galaxies further strengthen the view that the strongest burst of star formation in the universe occurred about two billion years after the Big Bang.

Reporting in the April 17 issue of the journal Nature, California Institute of Technology astronomers Scott Chapman and Andrew Blain, along with their United Kingdom colleagues Ian Smail and Rob Ivison, provide the redshifts of 10 extremely distant galaxies which strongly suggest that the most luminous galaxies ever detected were produced over a rather short period of time.

A basic discovery in magnetic semiconductors could result in a new generation of devices for sensors and memory applications -- and perhaps, ultimately, quantum computation -- physicists from the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Santa Barbara have announced.

The new phenomenon, called the giant planar Hall effect, has to do with what happens when the spins of current-carrying electrons are manipulated.

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

Scientists "arriving quickly on the scene" of an October 4 gamma-ray burst have announced that their rapid accumulation of data has provided new insights about this exotic astrophysical phenomenon. The researchers have seen, for the first time, ongoing energizing of the burst afterglow for more than half an hour after the initial explosion.

The findings support the "collapsar" model, in which the core of a star 15 times more massive than the sun collapses into a black hole.

Caltech computer scientists have developed a new data transfer protocol for the Internet fast enough to download a full-length DVD movie in less than five seconds.

The protocol is called FAST, standing for Fast Active queue management Scalable Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The researchers have achieved a speed of 8,609 megabits per second (Mbps) by using 10 simultaneous flows of data over routed paths, the largest aggregate throughput ever accomplished in such a configuration.