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 ...

At 200 times stronger than steel, graphene has been hailed as a super material of the future since its discovery in 2004. The ultrathin carbon material is an incredibly strong electrical and thermal ...

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 ...

Deep inside all matter in the universe, electrons are buzzing around and behaving as if they are twirling around on their axes like spinning tops. These "spinning" electrons are fundamental to quantum ...

In the 1930s when scientists, including Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger, first discovered the phenomenon of entanglement, they were perplexed. Entanglement, disturbingly, required two separated ...

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 increased cell proliferation is a hallmark of cancerous tissues, in some cases, it may actually be protective against tumor growth, according to a new study from Caltech researchers. Using ...

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 ...

Carl Grillmair, an astronomer at Caltech's IPAC science and data center for astronomy and planetary science, passed away suddenly on February 16, 2026. He was 67 years old. Grillmair's science ...