As nearly one in six couples experience fertility issues, in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is an increasingly common form of reproductive technology. However, there are still many unanswered scientific questions about the basic biology of embryos, including the factors determining their viability, that, if resolved, could ultimately improve IVF's success rate.A new study from Caltech examines mouse […]

Foremother Love: Phillis Wheatley and Black Feminist Criticism, published by Duke University Press in July 2025 and authored by Dana Murphy, Assistant Professor of Black Studies and English, honors the writing of Phillis Wheatley (Peters)—a Black woman who lived in colonial North America/New England in the latter half of the 18th century whose work was […]

Kenny Lau, a postdoctoral scholar research associate and experimental cosmologist in the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA), passed away on November 22, 2025. He was 36 years old.Lau first joined the Caltech community as a visiting graduate student in 2021. In 2023, he became a postdoctoral scholar in the Observational Cosmology group, working […]

Snap a picture of a busy or complex scene—perhaps a crosswalk in Manhattan or a cluttered family room. Now imagine being able to click on any object in that scene, no matter how occluded or small it might be, and reconstruct that object in three dimensions. Meta Superintelligence Labs recently released an open-source tool called […]

Caltech and the University of Chicago co-hosted the second Conference on AI+Science on November 10 and 11, 2025. The conference—held at the Institute; the Huntington; and online—spotlighted the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in furthering scientific discovery across the physical and biological sciences. Funded by the Margot and Tom Pritzker Foundation, the […]

A detailed new image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has unveiled the most precise portrait yet of a rare cosmic system: a pair of massive dying stars, known as Wolf–Rayet stars, orbiting tightly around each other. The rare system, named Apep after an ancient Egyptian deity that shares a similar shape, was first imaged […]

Annette J. Smith, Caltech professor of literature, emerita, passed away on October 18, 2025. She was 100 years old.Smith was born Annette J. Leblanc in Algeria on December 8, 1924, "in an 18th-century Arabian palace which had 70 rooms," Smith said in her 2010–2011 oral history interview. A fourth-generation resident of Algiers, Smith was the […]

L'Oréal USA has awarded one of five 2025 For Women in Science grants to Caltech's Georgia Squyres, a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Dianne Newman, Gordon M. Binder/Amgen Professor of Biology and Geobiology and Merkin Institute Professor.Squyres investigates the complex world of bacterial communities, specifically biofilms. Biofilms are found in nearly every environment on […]

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have quickly shown how artificial intelligence (AI) can impact workflow, content creation, and even our daily lives. By ingesting as much of the written word as possible and learning patterns and relationships from that vast store of data, they can complete such tasks as creating travel itineraries, offering […]

As Earth's climate warms and changes, sustainable agricultural practices are critical for feeding a rapidly growing population. Can we genetically engineer crops to adapt to drought and other effects of a warming climate?A roadmap for how new techniques and approaches in genomics and plant developmental biology can enable this is illustrated in a recent series […]