News release archives
Astronauts on the Web
10/22/2009 - Thanks, in part, to its famed Graduate Aerospace Laboratories (GALCIT) and its historic ties to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech has attracted many students who at some point dreamed of riding a rocket into space. And thus far, 11 of them have actually become NASA astronauts.
Lean more about the Institute's astronaut corps in this slideshow, featuring some rarely seen images. For more coverage of Caltech's alumni astronauts, check out these Caltech News articles: "A Cosmic Reunion" and "A Little Science on the Moon."
Caltech Researchers Reveal Unexpected Sources of Nitrogen Fixation
10/15/2009 - Caltech researchers led by assistant professor of geobiology Victoria Orphan have found that the members of a deep-sea symbiotic microbial community are able to fix nitrogen. The unexpected metabolic ability may help solve a lingering mystery about the world's nitrogen cycling budget. A paper about the work appears in the October 16 issue of the journal Science.
Caltech Scientists Discover Storms in the Tropics of Titan
08/12/2009 - Saturn's moon Titan is dull, weatherwise. Nothing happens for years, making it hard to understand the carved channels that seem to line the surface. Now Titan has finally been caught in the act. Caltech planetary astronomer Mike Brown and his colleagues set a trap for Titan, waited years for it to be tripped, and, finally, nabbed their prey: bright but transient clouds over Titan's tropics, a region where clouds were thought unlikely to form.
Research Shows Earliest Animals Lived in Lake Environment
08/04/2009 - Conventional wisdom has it that animal evolution began in the ocean, with animal life adapting to terrestrial environments much later in Earth history. But a UC Riverside–led team of researchers including Thomas F. Bristow, who is now Caltech's O K Earl Postdoctoral Scholar in Geology, has found that the first animal fossils in the paleontological record are actually preserved in ancient lake deposits, not marine. In their research, the authors focused on South China's Doushantuo Formation, one of the oldest fossil beds, which houses highly preserved fossils dated to about 600 million years ago. Their study was published in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Caltech, JPL Researchers Provide Evidence that Microbial Mats Helped Build 3.4-Billion-Year-Old Stromatolites
07/16/2009 - Stromatolites are dome- or column-like sedimentary rock structures that are formed in shallow water, layer by layer, over long periods of geologic time. Now, researchers from Caltech and JPL have provided evidence that some of the most ancient stromatolites on our planet were built with the help of communities of equally ancient microorganisms, a finding that "adds unexpected depth to our understanding of the earliest record of life on Earth," notes JPL astrobiologist Abigail Allwood, a visitor in geology at Caltech. Their research, published in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), might also provide a new avenue for exploration in the search for signs of life on Mars.
