Snap a picture of a busy or complex scene—perhaps a crosswalk in Manhattan or a cluttered family room. Now imagine being able to click on any object in that scene, no matter how occluded or small it might be, and reconstruct that object in three dimensions. Meta Superintelligence Labs recently released an open-source tool called […]

Caltech and the University of Chicago co-hosted the second Conference on AI+Science on November 10 and 11, 2025. The conference—held at the Institute; the Huntington; and online—spotlighted the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in furthering scientific discovery across the physical and biological sciences. Funded by the Margot and Tom Pritzker Foundation, the […]

A detailed new image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has unveiled the most precise portrait yet of a rare cosmic system: a pair of massive dying stars, known as Wolf–Rayet stars, orbiting tightly around each other. The rare system, named Apep after an ancient Egyptian deity that shares a similar shape, was first imaged […]

Annette J. Smith, Caltech professor of literature, emerita, passed away on October 18, 2025. She was 100 years old.Smith was born Annette J. Leblanc in Algeria on December 8, 1924, "in an 18th-century Arabian palace which had 70 rooms," Smith said in her 2010–2011 oral history interview. A fourth-generation resident of Algiers, Smith was the […]

L'Oréal USA has awarded one of five 2025 For Women in Science grants to Caltech's Georgia Squyres, a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Dianne Newman, Gordon M. Binder/Amgen Professor of Biology and Geobiology and Merkin Institute Professor.Squyres investigates the complex world of bacterial communities, specifically biofilms. Biofilms are found in nearly every environment on […]

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have quickly shown how artificial intelligence (AI) can impact workflow, content creation, and even our daily lives. By ingesting as much of the written word as possible and learning patterns and relationships from that vast store of data, they can complete such tasks as creating travel itineraries, offering […]

As Earth's climate warms and changes, sustainable agricultural practices are critical for feeding a rapidly growing population. Can we genetically engineer crops to adapt to drought and other effects of a warming climate?A roadmap for how new techniques and approaches in genomics and plant developmental biology can enable this is illustrated in a recent series […]

On a June morning this past summer, a small group of Techers who had recently completed their first year at the Institute huddled over a tarp, running sensor tests and filling their balloon with helium at a site near El Mirage in the Mojave Desert. The students were getting ready to launch GLOBO, a high-altitude […]

Was life ever possible on Mars? On November 19, 2025, at 7:30 p.m., Ashwin Vasavada (PhD '98), a project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages for NASA, will discuss the Curiosity rover's 13-year endeavor to investigate the habitability of the Red Planet.In a public talk called "Thirteen Years in the Dust: […]

On Monday, November 3, 2025, Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates addressed more than 1,000 Caltech students, postdoctoral scholars, faculty, and staff at Beckman Auditorium speaking on his vision of climate resiliency that prioritizes human welfare."Tonight's turnout and the Beckman buzz here are testaments to Bill Gates's ability to capture the public imagination as an […]