2020: A Year In Review

At Caltech, as throughout the rest of the world, 2020 was a year like no other. This unprecedented year was filled with personal and professional challenges as well as fast-breaking and paradigm-shifting events, all of which were framed by (and helped to shape) incredible advances and discoveries in science, engineering, and technology, realized thanks to the ingenuity, insight, and perseverance of Caltech's community of researchers and scholars, students and staff. In January, the Zwicky Transient Factory telescope discovered the first asteroid to orbit around the sun, entirely within the orbit of the planet Venus. In other space news, NASA retired the Spitzer Space Telescope after 16 years of astronomical discoveries. Researchers developed a tiny prosthetic device that enables jellyfish to swim more efficiently, which could one day enable the use of jellyfish to record information about the ocean. Though it was still unknown that the year would become dominated by the novel coronavirus that was just beginning to make the news, Caltech issued precautionary information about COVID-19. In February, researchers developed a sweat sensor to quantitatively measure a person's stress levels.