Bringing a novel approach to a classic problem, researchers have revealed how changes in ocean chemistry over the past 2 billion years have left an imprint on volcanic rocks formed in island arcs. Island arcs, which arise from volcanic activity along subduction zones where one tectonic plate dives beneath another, play a crucial role in […]

Each year the American Physical Society (APS) gives the LeRoy Apker Award to two individuals to provide "encouragement to students who have demonstrated great potential for future scientific accomplishment." This year, Jin Ming Koh (BS '23) has received the Apker Award "for the first experimental realization of a measurement-induced entanglement phase transition on a superconducting […]

Hundreds of papers have been written about the first known brown dwarf, Gliese 229 B, since its discovery by Caltech researchers at the Institute's Palomar Observatory in 1995. But a pressing mystery has persisted about this orb: It is too dim for its mass. Brown dwarfs are lighter than stars and heavier than gas giants […]

Thomas Hutchcroft, a professor of mathematics at Caltech, has been awarded a 2024 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, an honor that comes with a grant of $875,000 over five years to pursue research.Since 1988, the Packard Fellowships have "encouraged visionary work by providing maximum flexibility through unrestricted funds that can be used in any […]

In nature, flying animals sense coming changes in their surroundings, including the onset of sudden turbulence, and quickly adjust to stay safe. Engineers who design aircraft would like to give their vehicles the same ability to predict incoming disturbances and respond appropriately. Indeed, disasters such as the fatal Singapore Airlines flight this past May in […]

As a new academic year gets underway at Caltech, part of the excitement on campus centers around the opening of the Institute's newest building: the Resnick Sustainability Center (RSC), which has been five years in the making. Located on the western edge of campus along Wilson Avenue, the striking four-story building will serve as a […]

Neural networks have a remarkable ability to learn specific tasks, such as identifying handwritten digits. However, these models often experience "catastrophic forgetting" when taught additional tasks: They can successfully learn the new assignments, but "forget" how to complete the original. For many artificial neural networks, like those that guide self-driving cars, learning additional tasks thus […]

Permafrost, the thick layer of perennially frozen ground that covers much of the Arctic, slows down the migration of Arctic rivers, according to a new Caltech study. River migration is a common process in which a river's path meanders over time due to erosion of the riverbanks. This rerouting, which can also occur in sudden […]

Physicists like to measure things, and they like those measurements to be as precise as possible. That means working at unfathomably small scales, where distances are much smaller than even the diameters of subatomic particles. Researchers also want to measure time down to a precision of less than one second per tens of billions of […]

Caltech professor emeritus John Hopfield has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks," according to the award citation. Hopfield, who is currently a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University, served as a […]