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Saturn's largest moon, Titan, looks to be the only place in the solar system—aside from our home planet, Earth—with copious quantities of liquid (largely, liquid methane and ethane) sitting on its surface. According to Caltech planetary astronomer Mike Brown, Earth and Titan share yet another feature, which is inextricably linked with that surface liquid: common fog. 

Techniques recently invented by researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech)—which allow the real-time, real-space visualization of fleeting changes in the structure of nanoscale matter—have been used to image the evanescent electrical fields produced by the interaction of electrons and photons, and to track changes in atomic-scale structures.

An international team of high-energy physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers led by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) joined forces to capture the Bandwidth Challenge award for massive data transfers during the SuperComputing 2009 (SC09) conference held in Portland, Oregon.

F. Brock Fuller, emeritus professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), died on November 6 at the Rafael Convalescent Hospital in San Rafael, California, four years after being diagnosed with diffuse Lewy body disease. He was 82.

In work that someday may lead to the development of novel types of nanoscale electronic devices, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has combined DNA's talent for self-assembly with the remarkable electronic properties of carbon nanotubes, thereby suggesting a solution to the long-standing problem of organizing carbon nanotubes into nanoscale electronic circuits.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a nanoscale crystal device that, for the first time, allows scientists to confine both light and sound vibrations in the same tiny space. "This is a whole new concept," notes Oskar Painter, associate professor of applied physics at Caltech. Painter is the principal investigator on the paper describing the work, which was published in the online edition of the journal Nature. 

Caltech scientists have uncovered the physical mechanism by which arrays of nanoscale pillars can be grown on polymer films with very high precision, in potentially limitless patterns. This nanofluidic process—described in a recent article in Physical Review Letters—could someday replace the conventional lithographic patterning techniques now used to build 3-D nano- and microscale structures for use in optical, photonic, and biofluidic devices.

An investigation by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration has significantly advanced our understanding of the early evolution of the universe. Analysis of data taken from 2005 to 2007 sets the most stringent limits yet on the amount of gravitational waves that could have come from the Big Bang in the gravitational wave frequency band where LIGO can observe. The results put new constraints on the details of how the universe looked in its earliest moments.

Scientists at the Caltech and IBM's Almaden Research Center have developed a new technique to orient and position self-assembled DNA shapes and patterns--or "DNA origami"--on surfaces that are compatible with today's semiconductor manufacturing equipment. These precisely positioned DNA nanostructures, each no more than one one-thousandth the width of a human hair, can serve as scaffolds or miniature circuit boards for the precise assembly of computer-chip components.

Using devices millionths of a meter in size, physicists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a technique to determine the mass of a single molecule, in real time.