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While many hotel rooms, recording studios, and even some homes are built with materials to help absorb or reflect sound, mechanisms to truly control the direction of sound waves are still in their infancy. However, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have now created the first tunable acoustic diode-a device that allows acoustic information to travel only in one direction, at controllable frequencies.

Water really is everywhere. Two teams of astronomers, each led by scientists at Caltech, have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. Looking from a distance of 30 billion trillion miles away into a quasar—one of the brightest and most violent objects in the cosmos—the researchers have found a mass of water vapor that's at least 140 trillion times that of all the water in the world's oceans combined, and 100,000 times more massive than the sun.

At the forefront of nanotechnology, researchers design miniature machines to do big jobs, from treating diseases to harnessing sunlight for energy. But as they push the limits of this technology, devices are becoming so small and sensitive that the behavior of individual atoms starts to get in the way. Now Caltech researchers have, for the first time, measured and characterized these atomic fluctuations—which cause statistical noise—in a nanoscale device. 

Caltech scientists have conducted experiments confirming which of three possible mechanisms is responsible for the spontaneous formation of 3-D pillar arrays in nanofilms. These protrusions appear suddenly when the surface of a molten nanofilm is exposed to an extreme temperature gradient and self-organize into hexagonal, lamellar, square, or spiral patterns. 

When black holes slam into each other, the surrounding space and time surge and undulate like a heaving sea during a storm. This warping of space and time is so complicated that physicists haven't been able to understand the details of what goes on—until now.

On March 29, the world's largest scientific society will bestow its highest honor on Ahmed H. Zewail, Caltech's Linus Pauling Professor of Chemistry and professor of physics.

Seven Canadian universities have joined a Caltech and Cornell University-led consortium to build CCAT, a proposed 25-meter aperture telescope. The telescope will be occupy a site 18,400 feet above sea level on Cerro Chajnantor, a mountain in Chile’s Atacama desert.

The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) got one step closer to realization this week, with the granting of a conservation district use permit by Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources. The permit gives the University of Hawai'i permission to build and operate TMT on the northern plateau of Mauna Kea; TMT will sublet the land from the University.

Caltech's Chiara Daraio is among this year's crop of Sloan Research Fellows. Daraio is one of 118 faculty from across the country to receive the two-year, $50,000 fellowship, given to early-career scientists and scholars in recognition of achievement and the potential to contribute substantially to their fields.

A hurtling asteroid about the size of the Titanic caused the scar that appeared in Jupiter's atmosphere in July 2009. Data from three infrared telescopes enabled scientists to observe the warm atmospheric temperatures and unique chemical conditions associated with the impact debris. An international team of scientists was able to deduce that the object was more likely a rocky asteroid than an icy comet.