A team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) university have successfully demonstrated wireless power transmission in space and the beaming of detectable energy back to Earth. This precedent was achieved through an innovative method known as Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment (MAPLE).

For women over 40, mammography is a necessary yet annoying procedure to endure every year or two. The technique, while valuable for reducing breast cancer deaths, is less than ideal because it exposes patients to X-ray radiation and requires their breasts to be painfully squished between plates. The plates flatten the breast so the X-rays can more easily pass through it and produce a clear image.

  Quantum mechanics is the branch of physics governing the sometimes-strange behaviour of the tiny particles that make up our universe. Equations describing the quantum world are generally confined to the subatomic realm—the mathematics relevant at very small scales is not relevant at larger scales, and vice versa.

Neutron stars consist of the densest form of matter known: a neutron star the size of Los Angeles can weigh twice as much as our sun. Astrophysicists don't fully understand how matter behaves under these crushing densities, let alone what happens when two neutron stars smash into each other or when a massive star explodes, creating a neutron star. One tool scientists use to model these powerful phenomena is the "equation of state."

The latest advance in a new type of optics aimed at improving microscopy started with a game of tennis three years ago. Unwinding after a long day of research in their respective labs, Mooseok Jang (PhD '16) and Yu Horie (who will receive his PhD in June 2018)—at the time, both graduate students at Caltech—met up for a game of tennis at Caltech's Braun Athletic Center courts.

There are few feelings more satisfying than gulping down water when you are thirsty. But how does your brain know when you are dehydrated or satiated, and how does it use this information to initiate or terminate drinking? Caltech scientists have now mapped the circuit of neurons within the mouse brain that regulates thirst by stimulating and suppressing the drive to drink water. This circuit offers insight into thirst regulation in the mammalian...

In the 1980s, researchers began discovering extremely bright sources of X-rays in the outer portions of galaxies, away from the supermassive black holes that dominate their centers. At first, the researchers thought these cosmic objects—called ultraluminous X-ray sources, or ULXs—were hefty black holes with more than 10 times the mass of the sun.

For the first time, it is possible to create complex nanoscale metal structures using 3D printing, thanks to a new technique developed at Caltech. The process, once scaled up, could be used in a wide variety of applications, from building tiny medical implants to creating 3D logic circuits on computer chips to engineering ultralightweight aircraft components. It also opens the door to the creation of a new class of materials with unusual pro...

Caltech and Disney Research have entered into a joint research agreement to pioneer robotic control systems and further explore artificial intelligence technologies. The agreement creates a framework that will allow researchers and engineers at Caltech and Disney Research to easily collaborate on projects of mutual interest. The three-year agreement officially began with projects focused on developing robots with new autonomous movement capa...

Engineers at Caltech and ETH Zürich in Switzerland have created a method to systematically design metamaterials using principles of quantum mechanics. Their work could pave the way for wider use of metamaterials in more mainstream applications by creating a purpose-driven framework for their design. Metamaterials are engineered materials that exploit the geometry of their internal structure to manipulate incoming waves.

In its search for exoplanets, NASA's Kepler telescope trails behind Earth, measuring the brightness of stars that may potentially host planets. The instrument identifies potential planets around other stars by looking for dips in the brightness of the stars that occur when planets cross in front of, or transit, them. Typically, computer programs flag the stars with these brightness dips, then astronomers look at each one and decide whether or not...

The human brain is composed of billions of neurons wired together in intricate webs and communicating through electrical pulses and chemical signals. Although neuroscientists have made progress in understanding the brain's many functions—such as regulating sleep, storing memories, and making decisions—visualising the entire "wiring diagram" of neural connections throughout a brain is not possible using currently available methods.

In the 1966 science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, a submarine is shrunken down and injected into a scientist's body to repair a blood clot in his brain. While the movie may be still be fiction, researchers at Caltech are making strides in this direction: they have, for the first time, created bacterial cells with the ability to reflect sound waves from inside bodies, reminiscent of how submarines reflect sonar to reveal their locations.

  Research from Caltech provides insight into how the brain works to recall memories and make decisions based on episodic memories. This research may one day lead to better understanding of diseases that affect memory such as Alzheimer's disease.

In 2006, Caltech's Paul Rothemund (BS '94)—now research professor of bioengineering, computing and mathematical sciences, and computation and neural systems—developed a method to fold a long strand of DNA into a prescribed shape. The technique, dubbed DNA origami, enabled scientists to create self-assembling DNA structures that could carry any specified pattern, such as a 100-nanometer-wide smiley face.

For the first time, engineers at Caltech have created a stable ring of plasma in open air—essentially capturing lightning in a bottle, but without the bottle. Matter can exist in four distinct phases: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Plasmas are made of charged particles—ions and electrons—and occur naturally on Earth as lightning, in the weather phenomenon called St. Elmo's fire, and in man-made objects such as fluorescent ...

The discovery of antibiotics in the early part of the 20th century changed modern medicine. Simple infections that previously killed people became easy to treat. Antibiotics' ability to stave off infections made possible routine surgeries, organ transplants, and chemotherapy for the treatment of cancer. But because of overuse and misuse, antibiotics are losing their effectiveness.

Researchers at Caltech have developed a prototype miniature medical device that could ultimately be used in "smart pills" to diagnose and treat diseases. A key to the new technology—and what makes it unique among other microscale medical devices—is that its location can be precisely identified within the body, something that proved challenging before.

The journal Astrobiology has published a special issue dedicated to the search for signs of life on Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. Included is a paper from Caltech's Jay Nadeau and colleagues offering evidence that a technique called digital holographic microscopy, which uses lasers to record 3D images, may be our best bet for spotting extraterrestrial microbes. No probe since NASA's Viking program in the late 1970s has explicitly searched for...

Traditional cameras - even those on the thinnest of cell phones - cannot be truly flat due to their optics: lenses that require a certain shape and size in order to function. At Caltech, engineers have developed a new camera design that replaces the lenses with an ultra-thin optical phased array (OPA). The OPA does computationally what lenses do using large pieces of glass: it manipulates incoming light to capture an image.