As a kid growing up in North Carolina, Prakash Mishra was very interested in planets. "My parents got me a telescope when I turned 6 or 7, and that was my personality for probably 10 years," he says, noting that he thought he would eventually study physics or astrophysics.But a series of what he calls […]

In 1700, life was miserable everywhere. Nearly everyone was poor, most had to toil long days in fields just to feed their families, and half of all children died before adulthood. But throughout the following century, technological and political shifts in northwestern Europe unleashed something completely new in human history that transformed the world—sustained economic […]

Intense, brief flashes of radio light called fast radio bursts (FRBs) travel across billions of light-years to reach Earth, passing through a fog of matter along the way. The bursts' origins are unclear but are thought to possibly come from highly magnetized dead stars called magnetars. The denser the fog the FRBs travel through, the […]

Chemists from Caltech and KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) have established a framework of cooperation that will enable joint research projects in chemistry while also nurturing the next generation of scientists in an international research setting.A delegation of Caltech scientists led by Sarah Reisman, the Bren Professor of Chemistry and Norman Davidson […]

In computer simulations of The Big One—a large magnitude earthquake that may occur along the San Andreas Fault in California—seismic waves ripple from a magnitude 7.8 epicenter near the Salton Sea up into the Los Angeles Basin. For minutes in this simulation, the ground beneath downtown Los Angeles shakes like Jell-O because the region is […]

When scientists study bacteria that are not in a petri dish or a test tube but in environments that more closely mimic their actual microbial home settings, they often find delightfully unexpected behaviors. For Sujit Datta, a professor of chemical engineering, bioengineering, and biophysics at Caltech, those oddities are an invitation to apply physics to […]

After over a decade of development with mission partners, Caltech, IPAC, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) are excited to support and pursue new areas of research and discovery following Sunday's launch of NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space TelescopeThe next generation of exoplanet imaging technology, designed and built at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which […]

On May 29, 2026, a crowd of about 150 people gathered in and around a colonial-style house on campus that belongs to Caltech's theater arts group, also known as TACIT. In one corner, visitors sat captivated by an attendee who claimed to have arrived from a future where whales have gone extinct. The group huddled […]

Election rumors, such as unverified accounts of voter fraud, have run rampant in the US in recent years. Powered by the speed of social media and artificial intelligence (AI), it can be hard for people to know what messages to trust. Now, a team led by Caltech researchers is using AI as a tool for […]

Researchers have discovered a thermal asymmetry deep beneath the surface throughout Mars's southern hemisphere.Based on gravitational measurements that give clues to the Red Planet's interior structure, Mars's interior southern hemisphere is around 200 to 400 degrees Celsius warmer than the northern half of the planet and partially molten. The surprising finding adds additional context to […]