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12/08/2008

High Energy Physics Team Sets New Data-Transfer World Records

Jon Weiner

Building on seven years of record-breaking developments, an international team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)--with partners from Michigan, Florida, Tennessee, Fermilab, Brookhaven, CERN, Brazil, Pakistan, Korea, and Estonia--set new records for sustained data transfer among storage systems during the SuperComputing 2008 (SC08) conference recently held in Austin, Texas. Caltech's exhibit at SC08 by the High Energy Physics (HEP) group and the Center for Advanced Computing Research (CACR) demonstrated new applications and systems for globally distributed data analysis for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, along with Caltech's global monitoring system MonALISA (http://monalisa.caltech.edu) and its collaboration system EVO (Enabling Virtual Organizations; http://evo.caltech.edu), together with near real-time simulations of earthquakes in the Southern California region, experiences in time-domain astronomy with Google Sky, and recent results in multiphysics multiscale modeling.?

11/20/2008

Caltech 4D Microscope Revolutionizes the Way We Look at the Nano World

Kathy Svitil

More than a century ago, the development of the earliest motion picture technology made what had been previously thought "magical" a reality: capturing and recreating the movement and dynamism of the world around us. A breakthrough technology has now accomplished a similar feat, but on an atomic scale--by allowing, for the first time, the real-time, real-space visualization of fleeting changes in the structure and shape of matter barely a billionth of a meter in size.

11/10/2008

W.M. Keck Foundation Gift to Enable Caltech and JPL Scientists to Research the Universe's Violent Origin

Jon Weiner

The W.M. Keck Foundation has awarded $2.3 million to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to fund the Keck Array--a suite of three microwave polarimeters at the South Pole--and the corresponding research initiative, "Imaging the Beginning of Time: A Search for the Signature of Inflation in the Cosmic Microwave Background."

10/24/2008

"Einstein's Cosmic Messengers" Multimedia Concert Inspired by Quest for Gravitational Waves

Martin Voss

Join two world-renowned California Institute of Technology (Caltech) physicists and an award-winning composer for the world premiere of "Einstein's Cosmic Messengers," an inventive multimedia concert. Inspired by Caltech's involvement with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), the presentation takes an innovative approach to communicating scientific exploration and discovery to the general public. The event takes place Thursday, October 30, at 8 p.m., in Beckman Auditorium on the Caltech campus.

10/08/2008

Keck Telescope and "Cosmic Lens" Resolve Nature and Fate of Early Star-Forming Galaxy

Kathy Svitil

Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and their colleagues have provided unique insight into the nature of a young star-forming galaxy as it appeared only two billion years after the Big Bang and determined how the galaxy may eventually evolve to become a system like our own Milky Way.

09/25/2008

Caltech Scientist Proposes Explanation for Puzzling Property of Night-Shining Clouds at the Edge of Space

Kathy Svitil

An explanation for a strange property of noctilucent clouds--thin, wispy clouds hovering at the edge of space at 85 km altitude--has been proposed by an experimental plasma physicist at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), possibly laying to rest a decades-long mystery.

09/22/2008

MacArthur Foundation Names Alexei Kitaev Latest Caltech "Genius"

Sonia Chernobieff

Alexei Kitaev, a California Institute of Technology (Caltech) faculty member, has been named a MacArthur Fellow, winning one of the five-year, $500,000 grants that are awarded annually to creative, original individuals and that are often referred to as the "genius" awards.

07/29/2008

Caltech Astronomers Describe the Bar Scene at the Beginning of the Universe

Kathy Svitil

Bars abound in spiral galaxies today, but this was not always the case. A group of 16 astronomers, led by Kartik Sheth of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, has found that bars tripled in number over the past seven billion years, indicating that spiral galaxies evolve in shape.

07/10/2008

Rare 'Star-making Machine' Found in Distant Universe

Kathy Svitil

Astronomers have uncovered an extreme stellar machine -- a galaxy in the very remote universe pumping out stars at a surprising rate of up to 4,000 per year. In comparison, our own Milky Way galaxy turns out an average of just 10 stars per year.

06/02/2008

LIGO Observations Probe the Dynamics of the Crab Pulsar

Kathy Svitil

The search for gravitational waves has revealed new information about the core of one of the most famous objects in the sky: the Crab Pulsar in the Crab Nebula. An analysis by the international LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) Scientific Collaboration to be submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters has shown that no more than 4 percent of the energy loss of the pulsar is caused by the emission of gravitational waves.

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