On October 11, NASA's Perseverance rover broke the record for the furthest distance traveled by a vehicle on another world. Initially set by NASA's Opportunity rover in 2014, Perseverance has now ...

The writer Malcolm Gladwell popularized the term "tipping points" to refer to the moment when a trend or social behavior crosses a threshold and rapidly spreads everywhere. In physics, tipping points ...

Kareem El-Badry, associate professor of astronomy at Caltech, has been selected as one of 20 Packard Fellows for 2026. The Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering provide just under $990,000 ...

Limbs evolved as a means of locomotion. From the primitive rotating flagella of bacteria to the wings of flies and even our own legs, animals use these appendages to travel to find food or mates, or ...

Humans throughout history have invented a variety of ways to fight back against troublesome bacteria. But bacteria live in a dangerous world too. The human body and other bacteria-rich environments ...

When Alex Blum was growing up in the Black Forest region of Germany, he was consumed by what some might consider an unusual pastime: reading fantasy books and trying to reconstruct the implicit ...

The California Institute of Technology ("Caltech," "we," or "us") operates a range of websites, applications, research platforms, digital services, and in-person programs and activities across many ...

Caltech students come from all over the world, bringing diverse experiences, perspectives, and passions. They share an unbridled sense of curiosity and an extraordinary aptitude for science, ...

To be truly useful, drones—that is, autonomous flying vehicles—will need to learn to navigate real-world weather and wind conditions. Right now, drones are either flown under controlled conditions, ...

In 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, made history when it made the first direct detection of gravitational waves, or ripples in space and time, produced by a pair ...

This past year, a new two-story building took shape in the northeast corner of the Caltech campus. Though modest in design, what takes place inside the structure could transform the future of ...

Ringed by mountains and capped by a temperature inversion that traps bad air, Los Angeles has had bouts of smog since the turn of the 20th century. An outbreak in 1903 rendered the skies so dark that ...