Word: caltech
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that theory received a jolt from another astronomical discovery announced this week. Scientists from Caltech, Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study have detected the most distant quasar (an exceptionally bright starlike object) ever spotted. It is billions of light-years away, and the researchers estimate that it existed when the universe was only 7% of its present age. It is hard to explain how a quasar could be formed that early, even under the influence of cold dark matter...
While all that may be true, says Caltech physicist Robert Leighton, "if the sun didn't have a magnetic field, it would be as dull as most nighttime astronomers think it is." What a difference a field makes. Twisted and stretched by both the sun's rotation and its roiling interior, the magnetic lines of force orchestrate the intriguing solar cycle...
...Baltimore the physicists proclaimed their answer: no way. After weeks of thorough experimentation, researchers from numerous prestigious institutions, including M.I.T., Caltech, Yale and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, reported that they had found no evidence of "cold" fusion. The scientists seemed incensed that they had wasted their time trying to replicate an error-filled experiment and chided the University of Utah for requesting a $25 million federal grant based on sloppy research. Said Caltech physicist Steven Koonin: "We are suffering from the incompetence and perhaps the delusions of Professors Pons and Fleischmann." When the nine members of the cold-fusion review...
...Luck Club, published last month, Chinese mothers offer their children a series of poignant confessionals. China's repressive Cultural Revolution is the subject of a forthcoming autobiographical novel, A Generation Lost, by Zi-Ping Luo. The Chinese immigrant, now a professor of chemistry at Caltech, was 14 when the Red Guards closed her school...
...solution is automation. "It will improve accuracy," says Stanford's Paul Berg. "It will remove boredom; it will accomplish what we want in the end." The drive for automation has already begun; a machine designed by Caltech biologist Leroy Hood can now sequence 16,000 base pairs a day. But Hood, a member of the Genome Advisory Committee, is hardly satisfied. "Before we can seriously take on the genome initiative," he says, "we will want to do 100,000 to a million a day." The cost, he hopes, will eventually drop to a penny per base pair...