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More Stormy Weather on Titan
12/21/2004

More Stormy Weather on Titan

Jill Perry
Titan, it turns out, may be a very stormy place. In 2001, a group of astronomers led by Henry Roe, now a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology, discovered methane clouds near the south pole of Saturn's largest moon, resolving a debate about whether such clouds exist amid the haze of its atmosphere.
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Physicists at Caltech, UT Austin ReportBose-Einstein Condensation of Cold Excitons
12/09/2004

Physicists at Caltech, UT Austin ReportBose-Einstein Condensation of Cold Excitons

Robert Tindol
Bose-Einstein condensates are enigmatic states of matter in which huge numbers of particles occupy the same quantum state and, for all intents and purposes, lose their individual identity. Predicted long ago by Albert Einstein and Satyendranath Bose, these bizarre condensates have recently become one of the hottest topics in physics research worldwide.
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Internet Speed Quadrupled by International Team During 2004 Bandwidth Challenge
11/24/2004

Internet Speed Quadrupled by International Team During 2004 Bandwidth Challenge

For the second consecutive year, the "High Energy Physics" team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers have won the Supercomputing Bandwidth Challenge with a sustained data transfer of 101 gigabits per second (Gbps) between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles. This is more than four times faster than last year's record of 23.2 gigabits per second, which was set by the same team.

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New Home for Astronomers
11/22/2004

New Home for Astronomers

For almost 100 years, Caltech has been at the forefront of astronomy and astrophysics, pioneering research that has led to greater understanding of the earth, the solar system, and the Universe. Now the Institute is about to help its world-renowned astronomers and other investigators continue their groundbreaking discoveries well into the 21st century.

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Manhattan Project Physicist Robert Bacher Dies
11/19/2004

Manhattan Project Physicist Robert Bacher Dies

Robert Tindol
Robert Fox Bacher, a renowned California Institute of Technology physicist who headed the experimental physics division at Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project, died Thursday, November 18, in Montecito, California. He was 99.
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Moore Foundation Gives $25.4 million to Caltech for Nanoscale Systems Initiative
11/10/2004

Moore Foundation Gives $25.4 million to Caltech for Nanoscale Systems Initiative

Robert Tindol
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded a $25.4 million grant to the California Institute of Technology to establish the Nanoscale Systems Initiative (NSI). The grant will support one of the scientific and technological community's promising research avenues--the creation of extremely tiny devices to augment and in some cases displace the state-of-the-art electronic systems of today.
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Laser Points to the Future at Palomar
11/04/2004

Laser Points to the Future at Palomar

Jill Perry

The Hale Telescope on Palomar Mountain has been gathering light from the depths of the universe for 55 years. It finally sent some back early last week as a team of astronomers from the California Institute of Technology, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Chicago created an artificial star by propagating a 4-watt laser beam out from the Hale Telescope and up into the night sky.

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Observing the Roiling Earth
10/27/2004

Observing the Roiling Earth

Marcus Woo

Thanks to a $13,254,000 grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Caltech has established the Tectonic Observatory, under the direction of Avouac, with the ultimate goal, he says, of "providing a new view of how and why the earth's crust is deforming over timescales ranging from a few tens of seconds, the typical duration of an earthquake, to several tens of million of years."

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CBI Reveals Motion in the Remotest Seeds of Galaxy Clusters in the Very Early Universe
10/07/2004

CBI Reveals Motion in the Remotest Seeds of Galaxy Clusters in the Very Early Universe

Robert Tindol
Cosmologists from the California Institute of Technology have used observations probing back to the remote epoch of the universe when atoms were first forming to detect movements among the seeds that gave rise to clusters of galaxies. The new results show the motion of primordial matter on its way to forming galaxy clusters and superclusters. The observations were obtained with an instrument high in the Chilean Andes known as the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI), and they provide new confidence in the accuracy of the standard model of the early universe in which rapid inflation occurred a brief instant after the Big Bang.
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David Politzer Wins Nobel Prize in Physics
10/05/2004

David Politzer Wins Nobel Prize in Physics

Hugh David Politzer has won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics for work he began as a graduate student on how the elementary particles known as quarks are bound together to form the protons and neutrons of atomic nuclei. The announcement was made today by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
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