Like scars that remain on the skin long after a wound has healed, earthquake fault lines can be traced on Earth's surface long after their initial rupture. Typically, this line of intersection between the area where the fault slips and the ground is more complicated at the surface than at depth. But a new study by Caltech researchers of the April 4, 2010, El Mayor–Cucapah earthquake in Mexico reveals a reversal of this trend.

Stretching for thousands of miles beneath oceans, optical fibers now connect every continent except for Antarctica. But although optical fibers are increasingly replacing copper wires, carrying information via photons instead of electrons, today's computer technology still relies on electronic chips. Now, researchers led by engineers at the Caltech are paving the way for the next generation of computer-chip technology: photonic chips.

When it comes to a small HIV-fighting protein, called cyanovirin-N, Caltech researchers have found that two are better than one.

While many hotel rooms, recording studios, and even some homes are built with materials to help absorb or reflect sound, mechanisms to truly control the direction of sound waves are still in their infancy. However, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have now created the first tunable acoustic diode-a device that allows acoustic information to travel only in one direction, at controllable frequencies.

Choosing what to have for dinner, it turns out, is a complex neurological exercise. But, according to researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), it's one that can be influenced by a simple shifting of attention toward the healthy side of life. And that shift may provide strategies to help us all make healthier choices—not just in terms of the foods we eat, but in other areas, like whether or not we pick up a cigarette.

For modern biologists, the ability to capture high-quality, 3D images of living tissues or organisms over time is necessary to answer problems in areas ranging from genomics to neurobiology and developmental biology. Looking to improve upon current methods of imaging, researchers from Caltech have developed a novel approach that could redefine optical imaging of live biological samples by simultaneously achieving high resolution, high penetration depth, and high imaging speed.

Water really is everywhere. Two teams of astronomers, each led by scientists at Caltech, have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. Looking from a distance of 30 billion trillion miles away into a quasar—one of the brightest and most violent objects in the cosmos—the researchers have found a mass of water vapor that's at least 140 trillion times that of all the water in the world's oceans combined, and 100,000 times more massive than the sun.

When Curiosity, the next Mars rover, arrives at the Red Planet next summer, it will be exploring Gale Crater, NASA announced today.

Artificial intelligence has been the inspiration for countless books and movies, as well as the aspiration of countless scientists and engineers. Researchers at Caltech have now taken a major step toward creating artificial intelligence—not in a robot or a silicon chip, but in a test tube. The researchers are the first to have made an artificial neural network out of DNA, creating a circuit of interacting molecules that can recall memories based on incomplete patterns, just as a brain can.

Each time a virus invades a healthy individual, antibodies created by the body fight to fend off the intruders. For HIV, the antibodies are very specific and are generated too slowly to combat the rapidly changing virus. However, scientists have found that some HIV-positive people develop highly potent antibodies that can neutralize different subtypes of the virus. Now, a study involving Caltech researchers points to the possibility of using these neutralizing antibodies in the development of a vaccine.