As a kid growing up in North Carolina, Prakash Mishra was very interested in planets. "My parents got me a telescope when I turned 6 or 7, and that was my personality for probably 10 years," he says, ...

In 1700, life was miserable everywhere. Nearly everyone was poor, most had to toil long days in fields just to feed their families, and half of all children died before adulthood. But throughout the ...

Soon, a new cone-shaped spacecraft will launch into space on a mission to chart the skies like never before. Called SPHEREx (for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of ...

As organisms diversified on planet Earth, some branches of the tree of life became exceptionally diverse, others far less so. Still others went extinct. Why evolution favored certain groups over ...

On September 14, 2015, a signal arrived on Earth, carrying information about a pair of remote black holes that had spiraled together and merged. The signal had traveled about 1.3 billion years to ...

The human brain has 100 billion neurons, making 100 trillion connections. Understanding the precise circuits of brain cells that orchestrate all of our day-to-day behaviors—such as moving our limbs, ...

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 ...

Engineers at Caltech have designed a new data-driven method to control the movement of multiple robots through cluttered, unmapped spaces, so they do not run into one another. Multi-robot motion ...

Bacteria are remarkably good swimmers—a trait that can be detrimental to human health. One of the most common bacterial infections in a healthcare setting comes from bacteria entering the body through ...

Although Europe represents only about 8 percent of the planet's landmass, from 1492 to 1914, Europeans conquered or colonized more than 80 percent of the entire world. Being dominated for centuries ...

Understanding Jupiter's early evolution helps illuminate the broader story of how our solar system developed its distinct structure. Jupiter's gravity, often called the "architect" of our solar system ...

In the future, delivering therapeutic drugs exactly where they are needed within the body could be the task of miniature robots. Not little metal humanoid or even bio-mimicking robots; think instead ...