Private research university in Pasadena, California, noted for science and engineering research and for operating NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Caltech-led researchers report that a neural operator predicted a simulated cloud tipping point more than two years ahead, with an error of about 11 days. The PNAS paper uses only simplified models, so the real climate remains untested.
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Caltech neuroscientists traced male fruit flies' threat displays to four major neurons downstream of a cluster of five to seven cells per brain hemisphere. Activating the neurons in pairs reproduced the display's wing and leg movements.
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Programs in China, Japan, the UK and the US are each targeting test launches of space-based solar power within five years, Live Science reports. Whether the power can be delivered at a price anyone would pay is a separate question.
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UC Berkeley, Austrian Academy of Sciences and Caltech researchers propose a superfluid helium gyrometer to detect Earth's frame-dragging in a lab. The case rests on a new thermal-noise analysis, since random phases can swamp the signal.
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UCSB and Caltech researchers built a CMOS-compatible ring-laser gyroscope on a chip that senses rotation as slow as 37 degrees per hour. It uses milliwatts of optical power and could eventually serve navigation where GPS is unavailable, the report says.
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A Caltech-led team has measured, in chains of up to 35 strontium atoms, the energy ladder John Cardy predicted for critical points in 1984. Because those predictions are exact, the match gives the researchers a calibration for aiming the same simulator at systems where no exact answer exists.
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Caltech and Michigan theorists find a dying Sun shedding mass in 4,600 random kicks unravels the giant planets' orbits within 10 billion years in 90% of runs. It is a simulation result built on kick sizes inferred from Gaia binaries, and the reported figures do not cleanly support the hundredfold speed-up over the old estimate.
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Stanford researchers report quantized jumps in phonons, the quanta of mechanical vibration, using thin-film lithium niobate devices. Team leader Amir Safavi-Naeini says error correction and mass spectrometry need phonon lifetimes 10 times longer.
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Caltech and Yale researchers report in Science a way to calculate the Kondo effect from a material's actual atomic and electronic structure. Their test systems, magnetic atoms in metals, are among the simplest strongly correlated materials and well short of the superconductors Caltech says the method could help simulate.
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SPHEREx spectra of 37 brown dwarfs in The Astrophysical Journal trace water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane across the full temperature range. Lead author Zafar Rustamkulov says models struggle to match objects whose clouds are thinning.
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NASA's Curiosity rover has climbed 1 km up Mount Sharp, by NASA's count the most elevation gained on Mars. Arm work on the wind-carved yardang cliffs ahead, the study meant to show how they formed, is hoped for in 2027.
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Caltech and University of Washington physicists simulated a particle collision on a 104-qubit IBM chip using a more efficient way to prepare wavepackets. The test used a simplified one-dimensional theory, so it shows the preparation step that had blocked such runs now fits on current hardware for toy models.
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Caltech physicists measured energy ladders two conformal field theories have predicted for about 40 years, using a line of laser-trapped strontium atoms. It is the known-answer test a simulator must pass before it is trusted on unsolved systems.
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Caltech historians Jed Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold use newly digitized Newton manuscripts to retell the 20 years before his 1687 Principia. Their evidence for the mathematical route is easier to check than their claim that he was sociable.
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UC San Diego and INRIA researchers forged RSA signatures on a 1,024-bit key inside a hardware security module after about 4 billion signing requests. The key stayed inside the device throughout, so for custodians the exposure is in signing settings, starting with the FIPS mode the researchers switched off.
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JWST found water-altered clay minerals on two of Neptune's small inner moons and its rings, with no water ice. The likely source is the shattered interior of a much larger lost moon.
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Caltech-led researchers say the Shunga-Francevillian carbon signal in Russia's 2-billion-year-old Zaonega rocks can be explained by local processes. That weakens one of the two drill-core records long read as evidence of a planetwide carbon-cycle upheaval.
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A Nature paper puts the boundary between stiff and soft Martian mantle directly beneath the surface dichotomy. The authors still keep a giant impact on their list of causes.
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Days after Caltech mathematicians called AI "slop mathematics" research misconduct, OpenAI's research lead said the company would stop sponsoring their competition. Organizers say they are talking to other firms.
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Quantum jumps were caught in trapped ions in 1986 and in photons in 2007. A resonator that rings for two milliseconds, read out by a superconducting qubit, now shows a single phonon going to zero as it happens.
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