Caltech students spent Friday, Nov. 2, harvesting olives; the 130 olive trees on campus are expected to yield 100-200 gallons. The idea was born last October when biology major Ricky Jones and physics major Dvin Adalian were observed picking the fruit by university president Jean-Lou Chameau--who promised "he would prepare them a home-cooked meal if they could figure out how to turn the olives into olive oil. They met the challenge using blenders, concrete blocks, window screens and a centrifuge." [more inside]
posted by GrammarMoses on Nov 3, 2007 - 19 comments

ShakeMovie The Near Real Time Simulation of Southern California Seismic Events Portal. Earthquake animations from Caltech.
"These movies are the results of simulations carried out on a large computer cluster. Earthquake movies will be available for download approximately 45 mins after the occurrence of a quake of magnitude 3.5 or greater."
posted by thatwhichfalls on Aug 9, 2006 - 2 comments

A billion smiley faces in a drop of water. In this month's Nature, Caltech researcher Paul Rothemund has described a method of creating nano-scale structures using DNA in a process simple enough for high-school chemistry class. This is the real nanotech.
posted by todbot on Mar 16, 2006 - 14 comments

The first images from the Spitzer Space Telescope, formerly known as the Space Infrared Telescope Facility and renamed after astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer, Jr., were released on Thursday. Launched on August 25, it obtains images by detecting the infrared energy radiated by objects in space, and it will drift behind the Earth as the planet orbits the sun.
posted by homunculus on Dec 20, 2003 - 3 comments

Genius goes online. A new website of Albert Einstein's scientific and other never-published travel diaries, various humanitarian statements, and his frequent pleas for peace, will be unveiled on Monday (May 19). The new site is the result of a collaborative effort of the Einstein Papers Project at Caltech and the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The site, www.alberteinstein.info. is scheduled to go live Monday, May 19, after 3 PM EDT. It's really a moment to look forward to.
posted by taratan on May 17, 2003 - 1 comment

Engineering students hang VW Beetle from Golden Gate Bridge -- I vaguely remember hearing about some various CalTech annual pranks over the years - but this one took some effort. So much for non-chalantly transporting a rusty Beetle across the border anymore...
posted by mecawilson on Feb 5, 2001 - 9 comments

Apparently, the digitization of all words ever spoken by human beings would take up 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Or, 5 exabytes. How long will it be before my laptop has that much space?
posted by sandor on Feb 23, 2000 - 3 comments