Caltech Appoints VP for Development and Alumni Relations
04/16/09 04/15/09 The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has named Peter deCourcy Hero as its new vice president for development and alumni relations. [more]
Caltech Scientists Control Complex Nucleation Processes using DNA Origami Seeds
04/23/09 04/08/09 The construction of complex man-made objects--a car, for example, or even a pizza--almost invariably entails what are known as "top-down" processes, in which the structure and order of the thing being built is imposed from the outside (say, by an automobile assembly line, or the hands of the pizza maker). [more]
Caltech Electrical Engineer Awarded $6 Million to Develop Self-Healing Circuits
04/23/09 04/07/09 Over the past few decades, transistors in computer chips have become progressively smaller and faster, allowing upwards of a billion individual transistors to be packed into a single circuit. But these circuits have an intractable design flaw: if a single transistor fails, the entire circuit fails. A Caltech researcher has been awarded a $6 million DARPA grant to develop self-healing circuits--which can detect, isolate, and fix their own flaws--to get around the problem. [more]
Caltech Researchers Train Computers to Analyze Fruit-Fly Behavior
04/25/09 04/07/09 Scientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have trained computers to automatically analyze aggression and courtship in fruit flies, opening the way for researchers to perform large-scale, high-throughput screens for genes that control these innate behaviors. [more]
New Radiation-free Targeted Therapy Detects and Eliminates Breast-Cancer Tumors in Mice
03/30/09 03/30/09 Combining a compound known as a gallium corrole with a protein carrier results in a targeted cancer therapy that is able to detect and eliminate tumors in mice with seemingly fewer side effects than other breast-cancer treatments, says a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) and the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. [more]
Thomas McGill, 66
04/22/09 03/27/09 Thomas McGill, professor of applied physics, emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) passed away on March 19. He was 66. [more]
Former Caltech Provost Steven Koonin Nominated for Under Secretary for Science
03/26/09 03/25/09 President Barack Obama recently announced his intention to nominate Steven E. Koonin, former provost and professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), as Under Secretary for Science in the Department of Energy [more]
Caltech Scientists Create New Enzymes for Biofuel Production
04/23/09 03/23/09 Researchers at Caltech and world-leading gene-synthesis company DNA2.0 have taken an important step toward the development of a cost-efficient process to extract sugars from cellulose--the world's most abundant organic material and cheapest form of solar-energy storage. Plant sugars are easily converted into a variety of renewable fuels such as ethanol or butanol. [more]
Caltech Researchers Find Tiny Genetic Change Keeps Nicotine from Binding to Muscle Cells
04/18/09 03/23/09 A tiny genetic mutation is the key to understanding why nicotine--which binds to brain receptors with such addictive potency--is virtually powerless in muscle cells that are studded with the same type of receptor. That's according to California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers, who report their findings in the March 26 issue of the journal Nature. [more]
Caltech Students Honored for Innovative Work
03/27/09 03/13/09 First Lemelson-Caltech Prize awarded to two students [more]

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