Caltech

In a recently published paper in Nature, the team shows that neurons in the IT cortex rapidly switch from a neural code that supports face detection to one optimized for face identification—all within roughly 20 milliseconds after a face is viewed. caltech.edu/about/news/fix…

Two Caltech professors were awarded 2026 New Horizons Prizes as part of the Breakthrough Foundation's annual prize ceremony, known colloquially as the "Oscars of Science." caltech.edu/about/news/cal…

Imaging is a critical technique in biology. Now, an interdisciplinary team of Caltech researchers has developed an artificial intelligence algorithm to identify cells in images for a wide variety of biological applications. caltech.edu/about/news/ai-…

Melatonin is a naturally produced molecule that has long been suspected to play a role in healthy sleep. Now, Caltech researchers have discovered a mechanism through which melatonin promotes sleep, using zebrafish models in the laboratory. caltech.edu/about/news/how…

Caltech researchers led by Austin Minnich, professor of mechanical engineering and applied physics, and deputy chair of the Division of Engineering and Applied Science, have demonstrated a laser-based method for generating thin films of materials. caltech.edu/about/news/mak…

Shu-ou Shan, Caltech's Altair Professor of Chemistry, has been elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's oldest honorary societies. She joins 251 other new members this year. caltech.edu/about/news/sha…

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is now on its way out of our solar system, never to return. caltech.edu/about/news/int…

In late March, the Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation awarded the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship to 454 third- and fourth-year university students, including four third-year scholars from Caltech. caltech.edu/about/news/fou…

Caltech researchers have identified geological features on Mars that could point to the existence of a long-dried ocean that once covered a third of the Red Planet's surface. caltech.edu/about/news/bat…

On Wednesday, April 8, the Lynn Booth and Kent Kresa Department of Aerospace at Caltech was formally dedicated in a ceremony held outside the north entrance of Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory. caltech.edu/about/news/cal…

The Caltech Space Challenge (CSC) returned to campus March 23–27 after a four-year hiatus, bringing together 32 graduate students from around the world to design a dual-target space mission to visit Venus and a nearby comet. caltech.edu/about/news/cal…

This is why international scientific exchange is so important. We must protect and encourage collaboration and mobility.

What if AI could invent enzymes that nature hasn’t seen? 👩‍🔬🧑‍🔬 Introducing 🪩 DISCO: Diffusion for Sequence-structure CO-design 14 rounds of directed evolution and over a year of wet lab work. That's what it took to engineer an enzyme for selective C(sp³)–H insertion, one of the most challenging transformations in organic chemistry. DISCO surpasses this with a single plate. No pre-specified catalytic residues, no template, no theozyme, no inverse folding, just joint diffusion over protein sequence and structure. 📝 Blog: disco-design.github.io 📄 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2604.05181 💻 Code: github.com/DISCO-design/D…

Varun Wadia (PhD '23), a former graduate student in neurobiology at Caltech, and a team of scientists and physicians have found that many of the same neurons that are active when looking at an object are also active when imagining that object from memory. caltech.edu/about/news/ima…

Special thanks to Sam Rose (Caltech), Gautam Vashisht (NASA JPL), Diana Roderick and Isaac Wilson (Palomar Observatory) who stopped looking at the stars for a moment to capture a stellar moment in our human history.

Do you see the bright stationary dot in the video? That's Artemis II, observed for one hour by the 200-inch telescope at the Palomar Observatory on Apr 2. Artemis II is actually zooming by in the sky (stars appear as streaks) as it fires its engine to reach a high-Earth orbit.

On 3/30, Caltech’s latest space demonstration, ASTRA, was successfully launched on the Space-X Transporter 16. The mission is hosted on the Momentus Vigoride 7 spacecraft and is funded by the DARPA NOM4D program. Read more: darpa.mil/research/progr…

Today, we are emerging from stealth and launching PrismML, an AI lab with Caltech origins that is centered on building the most concentrated form of intelligence. At PrismML, we believe that the next major leaps in AI will be driven by order-of-magnitude improvements in intelligence density, not just sheer parameter count. Our first proof point is the 1-bit Bonsai 8B, a 1-bit weight model that fits into 1.15 GBs of memory and delivers over 10x the intelligence density of its full-precision counterparts. It is 14x smaller, 8x faster, and 5x more energy efficient on edge hardware while remaining competitive with other models in its parameter-class. We are open-sourcing the model under Apache 2.0 license, along with Bonsai 4B and 1.7B models. When advanced models become small, fast, and efficient enough to run locally, the design space for AI changes immediately. We believe in a future of on-device agents, real-time robotics, offline intelligence and entirely new products that were previously impossible. We are excited to share our vision with you and keep working in the future to push the frontier of intelligence to the edge.

A petite woman with grand ideas about the future of the Palomar Observatory! Read this article about Mansi Kasliwal , our @ztfsurvey PI and a professor of astronomy at @Caltech who was selected as the next director of the iconic observatory near San Diego alumni.caltech.edu/techer/stories…

John O. Dabiri (PhD '05), Caltech's Centennial Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, and Joseph Lazio, a visiting associate in astronomy, have been named 2025 fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) caltech.edu/about/news/joh…