Scientists are announcing this week their detection of a June 14 gamma-ray burst that probably signals a hitherto undetected type of cosmic explosion. The hybrid gamma-ray burst probably created a new black hole, but the details of how the explosion occurred are unclear.

Carbon nanotubes are tiny garden-hose-like hollow tubes that have considerable promise for future applications such as nano-sized plumbing and nanolithography, and for the creation of numerous tiny devices such as mass sensors and actuators.

As the California Institute of Technology's first woman to win a Marshall Scholarship, Emma Schmidgall is making a little history, but it's a place where she feels right at home. "I've been to Cambridge before," she says. "It's like something out of 'Harry Potter.'"

How did the West conquer the world? The secret, says California Institute of Technology economic historian Philip T. Hoffman: technological innovation.

When it comes to digestive ability, termites have few rivals due to the gut activities that allow them to literally digest a two-by-four. But they do not digest wood by themselves-they are dependent on the 200 or so diverse microbial species that call termite guts home and are found nowhere else in nature.

Two and a half billion years ago, when our evolutionary ancestors were little more than a twinkle in a bacterium's plasma membrane, the process known as photosynthesis suddenly gained the ability to release molecular oxygen into Earth's atmosphere, causing one of the largest environmental changes in the history of our planet.

Charles S. Shapiro, an expert on the effects of nuclear-weapons testing on humans and the environment, will speak about significant findings of his many years of study on this topic at a seminar at 4 p.m. on November 29, in room 142 of the W.M. Keck Engineering Laboratories at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

An international team of physicists, computer scientists, and network engineers joined forces to set new records for sustained data transfer between storage systems during the SuperComputing 2006 (SC06) Bandwidth Challenge (BWC).

Computers and liquids are not very compatible, as many a careless coffee-drinking laptop owner has discovered. But a new breakthrough by researchers at the California Institute of Technology could result in future logic circuits that literally work in a test tube-or even in the human body.