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NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is depicted in this artist’s concept traveling through interstellar space, or the space between stars, which it entered in 2012. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ After some inventive sleuthing, the mission team can — for the first time in five months — check the health and status of the most distant human-made object in existence. For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin,...

ZOMG! Have the brainiacs followed the yellowoke path to diversity, equity, and inclusion mediocrity?Caltech drops calculus, chemistry, physics class requirements if your school doesn't offer them, allowing you to take Khan Academy instead. Doesn't seem that crazy. Until you notice they also got rid of the SAT, so it's all about diversity over merit. https://t.co/NcCtGXSC2u— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) August 31, 2023Ehhhh…not quite yet. Jury’s out.What they’re planning sounds like a reasonable work-around for particularly gifted, but educationally deprived students who aspire to greater things. The young lady the reporter begins the story with went to a school that didn’t offer...

Racial consideration for college admissions hearkens back to Grutter v. Bollinger, the landmark decision by the Supreme Court in 2003. It held that affirmative action programs can pass muster as long as they are “narrowly tailored” in order to achieve the “compelling interest” of promoting diversity on college campuses. Colleges across the country have since repeatedly cited the ruling as the basis for their use of “holistic” admissions. But the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division isn’t buying that claim from Yale, saying they let skin color play an inordinate role in admissions. It charges that Yale, Harvard, and others are...

Robert Millikan’s name adorns buildings at Caltech, Pomona College and other institutions of higher education. He won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1923. And typical for a scientist of his time, he was a fan of eugenics and did not actively promote women in STEM fields. That’s reason enough to remove his name from a Pomona building with labs for physics, astronomy and math, according to a petition circulated among Pomona students, alumni and faculty, according to The Claremont Independent, which covers Claremont Consortium colleges including Pomona. The 1958 building was modernized in 2015.

California Institute of Technology (or Caltech) accidentally discovered the bacteria after performing unrelated experiments using a chalk-like type of manganese, a commonly found chemical element. Dr. Jared Leadbetter, professor of environmental microbiology at Caltech in Pasadena, left a glass jar covered with the substance to soak in tap water in his office sink, and left the vessel for several months when he went to work off campus. When he returned, Leadbetter found the jar coated with a dark material. Researchers discovered that the black coating found on the jar was oxidized manganese which had been generated by newly discovered bacteria...

Doctors have used focused ultrasound to destroy tumors without invasive surgery for some time. However, the therapeutic ultrasound used in clinics today indiscriminately damages cancer and healthy cells alike. Most forms of ultrasound-based therapies either use high-intensity beams to heat and destroy cells or special contrast agents that are injected prior to ultrasound, which can shatter nearby cells. Heat can harm healthy cells as well as cancer cells, and contrast agents only work for a minority of tumors. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology and City of Hope Beckman Research Institute have developed a low-intensity ultrasound approach that exploits...

In the modern historical record, the 160-mile-long Garlock fault on the northern edge of the Mojave Desert has never been observed to produce either a strong earthquake or to even creep — the slow movement between earthquakes that causes a visible scar on the ground surface. But new satellite radar images now show that the fault has started to move, causing a bulging of land that can be viewed from space. “This is surprising, because we’ve never seen the Garlock fault do anything. Here, all of a sudden, it changed its behavior,” said the lead author of the study, Zachary...

Researchers there have developed a way to levitate and propel objects using only light, by adding specific nanoscale patterning to their surface. Scientists have the ability to move and manipulate tiny objects with the use of ‘optical tweezers.’ The tweezers move objects via the radiative pressure from a sharply focused beam of laser light. However, this impressive tool can only move small very small objects a very limited distance. The trick is to create very specific patterns on the object's surface. These nanoscale patterns interact with the light so that the object keeps ‘righting’ itself if disturbed so that it...

Before man can cross the vast distances of space, the designs of spacecraft’s sails will be key – striking a delicate balance between mass, strength in addition to reflectivity. Working with NASA, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) scientists have created the fresh material out of silicon in addition to its oxide, silica. The team has figured out that will super-thin structures made of This specific composite can transform infrared light waves into a momentum that will would likely accelerate a probe to 134,000,000 mph. Speeds like This specific can carry a little probe to our closest stellar neighbours, a huddle...

A report of a major earthquake off the coast of Santa Barbara was actually a false alarm based on a quake that happened in 1925. The U.S. Geological Survey sent out an email alert Wednesday afternoon saying a magnitude 6.8 quake had struck in the Pacific Ocean 10 miles west of Santa Barbara. The event was promptly deleted from the USGS website, but screenshots of the page made their way around social media. ... USGS geophysicist Rafael Abreu says researchers were working on the 1925 earthquake when the mistaken alert went out. Dr. Lucy Jones made light of the error,...

Engineers have exploited the tenacious nature of life by persuading it to build with silicon – the stuff of microchips. In a breakthrough study, researchers have tweaked a bacterial protein to knit together carbon and silicon, producing the basis for compounds used in everything from drugs to TV screens. The team claims that their enzyme is far more efficient than man-made catalysts and could reduce the cost of making the compounds and avoid using toxic material. As silicon-carbon bonds are not known to occur naturally, they are made in the lab by chemists. But in a first, the CalTech team...

“These misconceptions or behaviors that work in Latin America but don’t work here because buildings are different here, earthquakes are different here,” says Pablo Ampuero, professor of seismology at Caltech. It’s the first time Caltech has hosted an event like this, where the community engaged directly with scientists and experts, asking questions and getting important answers. The event stressed the importance of being prepared for disaster. And how earthquakes here in the US are different from those in other parts of the world. “When you look at what the earthquake will do to us, it probably won’t kill us, but...

More clues about where to search for a possible ninth planet lurking in the fringes of our solar system are emerging from the Kuiper belt, the icy debris field beyond Neptune. And new calculations suggest that the putative planet might be brighter — and a bit easier to find — than once thought. Evidence for the existence of Planet Nine is scant, based on apparent alignments among the orbits of the six most distant denizens of the Kuiper belt (SN: 2/20/16, p. 6). Their oval orbits all point in roughly the same direction and lie in about the same plane,...

In January, researchers at Caltech in the US suggested a large, additional planet might be lurking in the icy outer reaches of the Solar System. Now, a team at the University of Bern in Switzerland has worked out what they say are upper and lower limits on how big, bright and cold it might be. The study has been accepted by the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. Prof Mike Brown and Dr Konstantin Batygin made their case for the existence of a ninth planet in our Solar System orbiting far beyond even the dwarf world Pluto. There are no direct observations...

The questions were coming fast and frantic: How strong was the earthquake? Was it on the San Andreas? Is the Big One coming? A massive temblor had struck near Joshua Tree shortly before 10 p.m., causing buildings to sway all the way to Las Vegas. As the public braced for more shaking, the media flocked to Caltech that night in 1992. One woman seemed to have all the answers. It was a magnitude 6.1, explained U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Lucy Jones, and the odds of a larger quake in the next three days stood at 15%. She shifted her weight...

Based on a careful study of Saturn's orbit and using mathematical models, French scientists were able to whittle down the search region for Planet Nine to "possible" and "probable" zones. Source: CNRS, Cote d'Azur and Paris observatories. Created by the author Astronomy, Cassini, Planet News, Solar SystemSearch Narrows For Planet Nine 25 Feb , 2016 by Bob King An imagined view from Planet Nine looking back toward the Sun. Astronomers think the massive, distant planet is gaseous, similar to the other giant planets in our Solar System. Credit: Wikipedia Last month, planetary scientists Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin of...

Planet Nine - a newly proposed but not yet confirmed world perhaps 10 times more massive than Earth that's thought to orbit far beyond Pluto — probably could not have triggered such "death from the skies" events, researchers said. Planet Nine likely has an elliptical orbit, coming within 200 to 300 astronomical units (AU) of the sun at its closest approach and getting as far away as 600 to 1,200 AU, Brown said. (One AU is the distance from Earth to the sun - about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers). Neptune orbits about 30 AU from the sun,...

Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers have nicknamed Planet Nine, has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun. The researchers, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, discovered the planet's existence through mathematical modeling...

Scientists have been wondering whether a "Planet X" exists in the dim regions far beyond the known planets, but it has remained largely speculative.... That started to change in March 2014, when a pair of astronomers announced that they’d discovered a brand-new dwarf planet, 2012 VP113, beyond the well-populated edge of the Kuiper belt, whose main mass stretches from Neptune’s orbit around 30 astronomical units (or 30 times the Earth-Sun distance) out to 50 astronomical units. It wasn’t the only such object: Sedna, a 600-mile-wide rock discovered in 2003, also boasted this far-out orbit, and it seemed to be making...

There might be a ninth planet in the solar system after all - and it is not Pluto. Two astronomers reported on Wednesday that they had compelling signs of something bigger and farther away — something that would definitely satisfy the current definition of a planet, where Pluto falls short. "We are pretty sure there's one out there," said Michael E. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. What Dr. Brown and a fellow Caltech professor, Konstantin Batygin, have not done is actually find that planet, so it would be premature to revise mnemonics of...