PASADENA, Calif. — The eerie music in the movie theater swells; the roller coaster crests and begins its descent; something goes bump in the night. Suddenly, you’re scared: your heart thumps, your stomach clenches, your throat tightens, your muscle…
Every day our brains are flooded by stimulation — sounds, sights and smells. At the same time, we are constantly engaged in an inner dialogue, ruminating about the past, musing about the future. Somehow the brain filters all this input instantly,…
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — For decades, carefully logging data about how mice go through the motions of their daily routines has been a tedious staple of behavioral and neuroscience research:
Hour 2, minute 27: mouse 4 is sleeping…
PASADENA, Calif. — Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have devised a new technique — using a sheet of carbon just one atom thick — to visualize the structure of molecules. The technique, which was used to obtain the…
PASADENA, Calif. — Using a diamond-anvil cell to recreate the high pressures deep within the earth, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have found unusual properties in an iron-rich magnesium- and iron-oxide mineral that…
PASADENA, Calif. — Flies follow horizontal edges to regulate altitude, says a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). This finding contradicts a previous model, which posited that insects adjust their height…
More than 900 scientific and nonscientific documents of one of the most influential intellects in the modern era, Albert Einstein, will soon be available online for the first time. The Einstein Archives Online website, at http://www.alberteinstein.info, will also be accompanied by an extensive database of archival information. It will be launched on May 19 during a daylong symposium on his life and work, to be held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Dave Stevenson has spent his career working on “swing-by” missions to the other planets. Now he has a modest proposal he’d like to swing by some government agency with a few billion dollars in available funding. According to Stevenson’s calculations, it should be possible to send a probe all the way to Earth’s core by combining several proven technologies with a few well-grounded scientific assumptions about the workings of the planet. The probe would sink straight to the core in an envelope of molten iron, sending temperature readings, compositional information, and other data along the way.
New distance measurements from faraway galaxies further strengthen the view that the strongest burst of star formation in the universe occurred about two billion years after the Big Bang. Reporting in the April 17 issue of the journal Nature, California Institute of Technology astronomers Scott Chapman and Andrew Blain, along with their United Kingdom colleagues Ian Smail and Rob Ivison, provide the redshifts of 10 extremely distant galaxies which strongly suggest that the most luminous galaxies ever detected were produced over a rather short period of time.
A basic discovery in magnetic semiconductors could result in a new generation of devices for sensors and memory applications — and perhaps, ultimately, quantum computation — physicists from the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Santa Barbara have announced. The new phenomenon, called the giant planar Hall effect, has to do with what happens when the spins of current-carrying electrons are manipulated. For several years scientists have been engaged in exploiting electron spin for the creation of a new generation of electronic devices –hence the term “spintronics” — and the Caltech-UCSB breakthrough offers a new route to realizing such devices.
In an advance that holds promise for integrating previously disparate functions on a chip, applied physicists at the California Institute of Technology have created a disk smaller than the diameter of a human hair that can store light energy at extremely high efficiency. The disk, called a “microtoroid” because of its doughnut shape, can be integrated into microchips for a number of potential applications. Reporting in the February 27, 2003, issue of the journal Nature, the Caltech team describes the optical resonator, which has a “Q factor,” or quality factor, more than 10,000 times better than any previous chip-based device of similar function. Q is a figure-of-merit used to characterize resonators, approximately the number of oscillations of light within the storage time of the device.
In a study of nonrelated people who have lived for a century or more, the researchers found that the centenarians had something in common: each was five times more likely than the general population to have the same mutation in their mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). That mutation, the researchers suggest, may provide a survival advantage by speeding mtDNA replication, thereby increasing its amount or replacing that portion of mtDNA which has been battered by the ravages of aging.