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 […]

In September 2000, Caltech's Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM) was born (albeit with a different name, the Institute for Quantum Information, or IQI). At the time, it was one of the world's first centers dedicated to the study of quantum information science—a field that uses the laws of quantum physics to create better […]

The most massive stars in the universe are destined to explode as brilliant supernova before collapsing into black holes. Yet one huge star appears to have never fulfilled its destiny; in a twist of irony, the star wandered too close to a gargantuan black hole, which gobbled it up, shredding the star to bits and […]

Two Caltech historians associated with the Einstein Papers Project have gathered together what they consider to be the most important of Einstein's writings, scientific and otherwise, in a two-volume set titled The Essential Einstein, published by Princeton University Press.Diana Kormos-Buchwald, the Robert M. Abbey Professor of History and director and general editor of the Einstein […]

Caltech researchers have reintroduced a classic technique to image the formation and growth of individual cells that make up biofilms, sticky masses of millions of cells that are often responsible for antibiotic-tolerant infections. The method will help answer longstanding questions about how biofilms behave, offering insights that have the potential to help combat them in […]

New analysis of chemical signatures measured by NASA's Curiosity Rover gives a peek at Mars' past to a time, some 3.7 billion years ago, when it was warmer and wetter.Through measurements of isotopic ratios of oxygen, a team of collaborators, including researchers from Caltech's campus and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have discovered that the […]