Ten years ago, the bones currently in your body did not actually exist. Like skin, bone is constantly renewing itself, shedding old tissue and growing it anew from stem cells in the bone marrow. Now, a technique developed at Caltech can render intact bones transparent, allowing researchers to observe these stem cells within their environment. The method is a breakthrough for testing new drugs to combat diseases like osteoporosis.

Researchers at Caltech and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have - in just two years - nearly doubled the number of materials known to have potential for use in solar fuels. They did so by developing a process that promises to speed the discovery of commercially viable solar fuels that could replace coal, oil, and other fossil fuels. Solar fuels, a dream of clean-energy research, are created using only sunlight, water, and CO2.

Electronic circuits are found in almost everything from smartphones to spacecraft and are useful in a variety of computational problems from simple addition to determining the trajectories of interplanetary satellites. At Caltech, a group of researchers led by Assistant Professor of Bioengineering Lulu Qian is working to create circuits using not the usual silicon transistors but strands of DNA.

A team of engineers and scientists at Caltech and ETH Zurich have developed an artificial skin capable of detecting temperature changes using a mechanism similar to the one used by the organ that allows pit vipers to sense their prey. The material could be grafted onto prosthetic limbs to restore temperature sensing in amputees. It could also be applied to first-aid bandages to alert health professionals of a temperature increase—...

Many self-organised systems in nature exploit a sophisticated blend of deterministic and random processes. No two trees are exactly alike because growth is random, but a Redwood can be readily distinguished from a Jacaranda as the two species follow different genetic programs. The value of randomness in biological organisms is not fully understood, but it has been hypothesised that it allows for smaller genome sizes—because not every detail...

A team of researchers from France, the U.S. and Italy has found evidence from the Tohoku-Oki earthquake that sensors that measure changes in gravity might offer a way to warn people of impending disaster faster than traditional methods. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, the group describes how they analysed data from gravity sensors near the epicenter of the Tohoku-Oki quake back in 2011 and found that it was pos...

Engineers at Caltech have created the visual analogue of noise-canceling headphones—a camera system that can obtain images of objects obscured by murky media, such as fog or clouds, by cancelling out the glare. When you drive through fog, objects on the road are difficult to see because the light from your headlights is mostly scattered back at you by particles in the fog—a phenomenon called "glare." This effectively masks the ob...

Applied scientists led by Caltech's Kerry Vahala have discovered a type of optical soliton wave that travels in the wake of other soliton waves, hitching a ride on and feeding off of the energy of the other wave. Solitons are localised waves that act like particles: as they travel across space, they hold their shape and form rather than dispersing as other waves do.

Ultrasound imaging is used around the world to help visualise developing babies and diagnose disease. Sound waves bounce off the tissues, revealing their different densities and shapes. The next step in ultrasound technology is to image not just anatomy, but specific cells and molecules deeper in the body, such as those associated with tumors or bacteria in our gut. A study from Caltech outlines how protein engineering techniques might help ...

Caltech applied scientists have developed a way to simulate large-scale motion numerically using the mathematics that govern the universe at the quantum level. The technique, presented at the International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics & Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH), held in Anaheim, California, from July 24-28, allows computers to more accurately simulate vorticity, the spinning motion of a flowing fluid.

  Using folded DNA to precisely place glowing molecules within microscopic light resonators, researchers at Caltech have created one of the world's smallest reproductions of Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night. The reproduction and the technique used to create it are described in a paper published in the advance online edition of the journal Nature.

The latest project of UWA physicist Professor David Blair and his team is the developing a tiny mirror to substantially improve gravitational wave detection. But in order to reduce this mirror's thermal vibrations they have suspended it like a cat flap. The team was heavily involved in producing LIGO that recently detected the first of these waves. And they have wasted no time in developing a device to increase its sensitivity even furt...

What if we could program living cells to do what we would like them to do in the body? Having such control could allow for the development of cell-based therapies that might one day replace traditional drugs for diseases such as cancer. In order to reach this long-term goal, however, scientists must first learn to program many of the key things that cells do, such as communicate with one another, change their fate to become a particular cell type...

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) has detected gravitational waves for the first time. This is one of the most important astrophysical observations since the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background. “We have detected gravitational waves. We did it!” said Daivd Reitze, Executive Director of the LIGO Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, at a press conference announci...

Caltech researchers have found evidence of a giant planet (nicknamed Planet Nine) tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the distant solar system. The object has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and, on average, orbits approximately 20 times farther from the Sun than Neptune (which orbits the Sun at an average distance of 2.8bn miles). It would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the Su...

A team of physicists led by Caltech's David Hsieh has discovered an unusual form of matter not a conventional metal, insulator, or magnet, for example, but something entirely different. This phase, characterised by an unusual ordering of electrons, offers possibilities for electronic device functionalities and could hold the solution to a long-standing mystery in condensed matter physics having to do with high-temperature superconductivity, the a...

DVDs and Blu-ray disks contain so-called phase-change materials that morph from one atomic state to another after being struck with pulses of laser light, with data ‘recorded’ in those two atomic states. Using ultrafast laser pulses that speed up the data recording process, Caltech researchers adopted a novel technique, Ultrafast Electron Crystallography (UEC), to visualise directly in four dimensions the changing atomic configuration...

Imagine you need to have an almost exact copy of an object. Now imagine that you can just pull your smartphone out of your pocket, take a snapshot with its integrated 3-D imager, send it to your 3-D printer, and within minutes you have reproduced a replica, accurate to within micrometres of the original object. This feat may soon be possible because of a tiny high-resolution 3-D imager developed at Caltech.