When Dehn Gilmore, professor of English at Caltech, was investigating ideas for her next book, she had to look no further than her own family tree. As the great-great-granddaughter of German-born British scientist Sir Arthur Schuster—a Victorian-era physicist who coined the term "antimatter," popularized the X-ray in England, and built one of the largest physics […]

How did the first solids that made up planets, moons, and asteroids form out of the "hot soup" that characterized our solar system's earliest years? New research from Caltech analyzing pieces of a meteorite has found that, in the same way that snowflakes crystallize around grains of dust, ancient stardust grains leftover from long-gone suns […]

In 1989, the Voyager 2 mission discovered six new moons orbiting Neptune, including five tiny ones that orbit just outside the planet's main rings. Because of their small sizes and locations, these satellites have been difficult to study from Earth. Now, using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of Caltech researchers has observed […]

In the crucial minutes after a fire ignites, decision-makers must consider a flood of information: What are the weather conditions in the fire's immediate vicinity? How might factors such as wind speed and direction, vegetation, and topology affect the fire's progression? Where are firefighting resources—both personnel and vehicles—located, and how much water and other necessary […]

Caltech chemistry professor Hosea Nelson (PhD '13) has his eyes on a big goal: He wants to know the three-dimensional (3D) structure of all the molecules found in the natural world. No one knows exactly how many structures that entails, but certainly, he says, it is at least millions. Those unknown structures make up what […]

Low-level clouds over the earth's oceans play a prominent role in keeping our planet cool by reflecting sunlight away from the surface. But their response to climate change has been hard to model. Now, researchers at Caltech and Google have uncovered important new insights about how clouds might respond to warming sea-surface temperatures and rising […]

Mark B. Wise, Caltech's John A. McCone Professor of High Energy Physics, passed away on July 10, 2026. He was 72.Wise, a particle physicist whose research focused on the fundamental constituents of matter and their interactions, played a key role in the development of the "heavy quark effective theory," a tool that has allowed physicists […]

Two new multi-institution collaborations led by Caltech scientists have been selected to receive first-round funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as part of the Genesis Mission, a national effort to use AI to accelerate scientific discovery. The first of the two funded projects aims to create a new kind of chemical refinery while […]

In American politics, there are often calls to eliminate or change long-standing practices, such as the Electoral College. One repeated call in recent years has been to eliminate the filibuster, a legislative tactic used by the US Senate, for example, to delay or block a bill by formally objecting to the measure. To overcome a […]

Rudolph A. (Rudy) Marcus, Caltech's John G. Kirkwood and Arthur A. Noyes Professor of Chemistry, passed away on July 16, 2026. The prolific chemist, who approached theory with infinite curiosity and the background of an experimentalist, was five days shy of his 103rd birthday.Marcus was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his theoretical […]