Our Milky Way galaxy is chock-full of dust. Stars are essentially dust-making factories that infuse the galaxy with a haze of dusty elements required for making planets and even life. But all that dust can make viewing the cosmos difficult.

A new piece of software developed at Caltech makes it easier to study the behavior of electrons in materials-even materials that have been predicted but do not yet exist. The software, called Perturbo, is gaining traction among researchers.

Stars, galaxies, and everything in the universe, including our own bodies, are comprised of so-called regular matter. Regular matter includes atoms and molecules, which are made up of tiny particles, such as electrons, protons, and neutrons.

What is happening in your brain as you are scrolling through this page? In other words, which areas of your brain are active, which neurons are talking to which others, and what signals are they sending to your muscles? Mapping neural activity to corresponding behaviors is a major goal for neuroscientists developing brain-machine interfaces (BMIs): devices that read and interpret brain activity and transmit instructions to a computer or machine.

In February, the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering (CCE) welcomed Grace Liang-Franco as its new division operations officer (DOO). She is charged with overseeing operations, logistics, finance, infrastructure, compliance, and other crucial administrative functions of the division.

A new paper explores the physics that drive big earthquakes along plate boundaries New research from Caltech seeks to explain the size of the forces acting on so-called "mature faults"-long-lived faults along major plate boundaries like the San Andreas Fault in California-in an effort to better understand the physics that drive the major earthquakes that occur along them.

A good way to find out what a cell is doing-whether it is growing out of control as in cancers, or is under the control of an invading virus, or is simply going about the routine business of a healthy cell-is to look at its gene expression.

Earth's land ecosystems absorb a large portion of all the carbon dioxide emissions produced by human activities, helping to slow global warming. On average for a given year, plants and soil take up, or fix, about 30 percent of human emissions.

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration, which produced the first-ever image of a black hole, revealed a new view of the massive object at the center of the M87 galaxy: a picture of its polarized light.

How many people would you need at a party to guarantee that at least three individuals know each other, or that at least three do not know each other? Working this out with pen and paper may take a while, but many mathematicians will readily tell you the answer is six.

For a bacterium, the world can be a tough place to survive, a constant competition for food and space. Some bacteria, like Pseudomonas aeruginosa , secrete toxic molecules that act as a defense mechanism against nearby competitor bacteria.

One of the more vexing qualities of the COVID-19 virus is that a person infected with it can be contagious for days before they begin to show symptoms. Because of this, the individual might feel perfectly well as they go to the grocery store, or to a playground with their children, or to a friend's house, even as they shed infectious viral particles.