Imagine if doctors could perform surgery without ever having to cut through your skin. Or if they could diagnose cancer by seeing tumors inside the body with a procedure that is as simple as an ultrasound. Thanks to a technique developed by engineers at the Ca... More »
After designing and building a four-wheeled remotely controlled rover, a team of Caltech students came away with second place in the RASC-AL Exploration Robo-Ops Competition at NASA’s Johnson Space Center earlier this month. Despite a weather delay and some wa... More »
A particularly strong jet stream churns through Saturn’s northern hemisphere in this false-color view from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI Turbulent jet streams, regions where winds blow faster than in other places, churn east and... More »
Were dinosaurs slow and stupid, as used to be the prevailing wisdom, or nimble and smart enough to eat an attorney, as in the 1993 film Jurassic Park? The answer depends largely on whether the T. Rex in question is cold blooded, like an alligator—although gato... More »
Distribution of annual carbon emissions from gross forest cover loss between 2000 and 2005 mapped at a spatial resolution of 11.5 miles (18.5 kilometers). Image credit: Winrock International A new study with NASA participation has sharply reduced previous esti... More »
This artist’s conception shows Kepler-36c as it might look from the surface of neighboring Kepler-36b.Image credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Astronomers have discovered a pair of neighboring planets with dissimilar densities orbiting very cl... More »
Artist’s concept of NuSTAR in orbit. NuSTAR has a 33-foot (10-meter) mast that deploys after launch to separate the optics modules (right) from the detectors in the focal plane (left). Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array... More »
Tom Harris holds one of his swords. [Credit: Marcus Woo] It’s called Greek fire. Invented around AD 670, it was one of the first flamethrowers, involving a pressurized siphon to shoot a stream of liquid flame at enemies. The Byzantine Empire used this incend... More »
NASA’s Mars Odyssey spacecraft passes above Mars’ south pole in this artist’s concept illustration. The spacecraft has been orbiting Mars since October 24, 2001. Image credit: NASA/JPL Mars Odyssey Mission Status Report NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter has been tak... More »
The galaxies pictured here have so much dust surrounding them that the brilliant light from their quasars cannot be seen in these images NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Quasars are the brilliant beacons of light that are powered by black holes feasting on captu... More »
Back in the 1960s, Charlie Richter (PhD ’28) installed a seismometer in his living room. It was bigger than his TV set, and it didn’t go with the sofa, but it saved him a lot of late-night drives into the Seismo Lab and was a great conversation piece. Now, if ... More »
Antarctic Postcard From the Past This artist’s rendition created from a photograph of Antarctica shows what Antarctica possibly looked like during the middle Miocene epoch, based on pollen fossil data. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Dr. Philip Bart, LSU A new ... More »
