Nanoscientists have achieved a milestone in their burgeoning field by creating a device that vibrates a billion times per second, or at one gigahertz (1 GHz).

In the subatomic particle family, the neutrino is a bit like a wayward red-haired stepson. Neutrinos were long ago detected-and even longer ago predicted to exist-but everything physicists know about nuclear processes says there should be a certain number of neutrinos streaming from the sun, yet there are nowhere near enough.

Jesse L. Greenstein, an astrophysicist whose many accomplishments included seminal work on the nature of quasars, died Monday, October 21, 2002, three days after falling and breaking his hip. He was 93.

A native of New York City, Greenstein grew up in a family that actively encouraged his scientific interests. At the age of eight he received a brass telescope from his grandfather—not an unusual gift for an American child, but Greenstein soon was also experimenting in earnest with his own prism spectroscope, an arc, a rotary spark, a rectifier, and a radio transmitter.

Barry Barish, an experimental high-energy physicist at the California Institute of Technology, has been nominated to the National Science Board by President George W. Bush. The White House made the announcement Thursday, October 17.

Barish is the Linde Professor of Physics at Caltech, and since 1997 has been director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project, a National Science Foundation–funded collaboration between Caltech and MIT for detecting gravitational waves from exotic sources such as colliding black holes.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology announced today a new paradigm for large-scale integration of microfluidic devices. Using new techniques, they built chips with as many as 6,000 microvalves and up to 1,000 tiny individual chambers.

Two members of the California Institute of Technology faculty have been named MacArthur Fellows, a prestigious honor bestowed each year on innovators in a variety of fields and commonly known as the "genius grants."

Charles Steidel, an astronomer, and Paul Wennberg, an atmospheric scientist, are two of the 24 MacArthur Fellows announced today by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago. Each of the 24 recipients will receive a $500,000 "no strings attached" grant over the next five years.

PASADENA, Calif. — The American Academy of Arts and Sciences has announced that five members of the Caltech faculty have been elected to membership in the academy for contributions to their respective scientific fields.

The Caltech faculty members who have been elected are Richard Andersen, Boswell Professor of Neuroscience; David Anderson, professor of biology and investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI); Ronald Drever, professor of physics, emeritus; Mary Kennedy, Davis Professor of Biology; and Mark Wise, McCone Professor of High Energy Physics.

High-temperature superconductors have long been the darlings of materials science because they can transfer electrical current with no resistance or heat loss. Already demonstrated in technologies such as magnetic sensors, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and microwave filters in cellular-phone base stations, superconductors are potentially one of the greatest technological triumphs of the modern world if they could just be made to operate more reliably at higher temperatures.

Astrophysical jets are one of the truly exotic sights in the universe. They are usually associated with accretion disks, which are disks of matter spiraling into a central massive object such as a star or a black hole. The jets are very narrow and shoot out along the disk axis for huge distances at incredibly high speeds.

Jets and accretion disks have been observed to accompany widely varying types of astrophysical objects, ranging from proto-star systems to binary stars to galactic nuclei.

Astrophysicists at the California Institute of Technology, using the Palomar 200-inch telescope, have uncovered evidence that a special type of pulsar has the strongest magnetic field in the universe.