Take one look around Markus Meister's new lab and office space on the top floor of the Beckman Behavioral Biology building, and you can tell that he has an eye for detail. Curving, luminescent walls change color every few seconds, wrapping around lab space and giving a warm glow to the open, airy offices that line the east wall. A giant picture of neurons serves as wallpaper, and a column is wrapped in an image from the inside of a retina. And while he may have picked up some tips from his architect wife to help direct the design of his lab, Meister is the true visionary—a biologist studying the details of the eye.

Caltech geology graduate student Katie Stack says her Caltech experience has provided her with the best of both worlds. Literally. As one of five Caltech graduate students currently staffing the Mars Science Laboratory mission, Stack is simultaneously exploring the geologic pasts of both Mars and Earth. She and her student colleagues apply their knowledge of Earth's history and environment—gleaned from Caltech classes and field sites across the globe—to the analysis of Curiosity's discoveries as well as the hunt for evidence of past life on the Red Planet.

During the early developmental stages of vertebrates—animals that have a backbone and spinal column, including humans—cells undergo extensive rearrangements, and some cells migrate over large distances to populate particular areas and assume novel roles as differentiated cell types. Understanding how and when such cells switch their purpose in an embryo is an important and complex goal for developmental biologists. A recent study, led by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), provides new clues about this process—at least in the case of neural crest cells, which give rise to most of the peripheral nervous system, to pigment cells, and to large portions of the facial skeleton.

Caltech engineers, who last year helped enable a paraplegic man to stand and move his legs voluntarily, have developed a new method to automate the system, which provides epidural electrical stimulation to people with spinal-cord injuries. This advancement could make the technology widely available to rehab clinics and thousands of patients worldwide. It would also reduce the system's training time and costs for hospitals and clinics and make it easier for patients to continue their rehabilitation at home.

Many ideas have been floated about how to potentially manipulate the planet's climate in order to counteract the effects of global warming—a concept known as geoengineering. But because some of these efforts could affect areas of the planet inequitably, geoengineering has often raised an ethical question: Whose hand would control the global thermostat? Now a team of researchers from Caltech, Harvard, and the Carnegie Institution says there doesn't have to be just a single global control.

Thanks to better voting technology over the last decade, the country's election process has seen much improvement, according to a new report released today by researchers at Caltech and MIT. However, the report notes, despite this progress, some problems remain.