October 21, 2025

What are your histories at Caltech? Chris: So I was brought on as the Student Affairs case manager, and when I started and the scope of my role was specifically case management for students of concern. Over the course of the last two years, that’s shifted and developed into my role now as the Director of the Center, where I continue to provide leadership to the CARE team, and also develop Accessibility Services while casting a vision for the future of student support at Caltech. Jocelyn:

By the time this comes out it will almost certainly be outdated, but here is the list and my initial impressions. Mortal Shell II (2026) — 6/10 Very cool trailer. While it seems like a Dark Souls game in terms of aesthetic, with grotesque and twisted beings in a dark world, it is not a FromSoftware title. The monster and character designs truly speak to something sinister in the world, but the included combat clips are much more gorey than you would see in Soulslike gameplay. Whi

October 19th, 2025 | 2pm – 4pm Members Present: Ashlyn, Angie, Elisa, Hannah, Bis, Ivy, Parker President’s Report (Ashlyn) External Funding Things are looking difficult with loss of external funding, but we will get through it. Title IX Increase in poor Title IX sentiment among the student body. Spoke with Lindsey. Students do not know how Title IX works, but they want to know. They deserve opportunities to engage with the Title IX office directly. Ashlyn wants

As Caltech researchers, there is perhaps nothing so guarded as data. We scrutinize with excessive detail our data collection methods, data analysis methods, false-positive and false negative rates, and possible sources of bias to ensure that our interpretation of said data is trustworthy. But even before that…we make sure the data is there. So, reading Jordan Marie-Smith’s NPR article, “USDA cancels survey tracking how many Americans struggle to get enough food,” felt like a punch in th

Time to review another four coffee shops featured in the 2025 Pasadena Coffee Passport! Last issue, I reviewed Rosebud Coffee, Copa Vida, Republik Coffee, and Jones Coffee Roasters. Since then, I have gone to another four coffee shops of the fourteen shops in the passport. Mandarin Coffee Stand Passport description: “This is P

OpenAI recently launched their latest image and video generation model, Sora 2, a tool enabling the production of images and video from a text prompt. The initial Sora model debuted in February 2024, and had the capability to generate short clips without any sound. The output was limited to a few seconds in length, or up to 20 seconds for the highest paid subscription. While the earliest models did not produce very high quality clips, the model technology has advanced quickly. At this point, it

The second floor of Kerckhoff had an unusual stillness that evening. People trickled into the small library room for the Science and Faith Examined (SAFE) talk, uncertain yet curious. I sat near the back, notebook open, listening to Tara—a physics PhD student and president of GCF—unfold her reflections on quantum field theory and the Bible. The hum of conversation faded as she spoke about particles, fields, and the hidden architecture of creation. Her words carried not only the weight of scienti

Since our last column, Caltech Athletics has continued to take great strides in the fall sports seasons! It’s almost the home stretch for many of these sports, so let’s catch up on the past couple weeks of updates: Cross Country The XC team has been competing quite a bit in the previous weeks, with the Pomona-Pitzer Invitational and the UCR Highlander Invite. At the PP Invitational, our men’s team had a standout performance by Stephen Goeringher (‘28) with a 39th finish out of over 200 comp

Content warning: This article contains brief mention of suicide. A small layout hiccup in our last issue left Joseph Greenwell captioned incorrectly, featuring Betsy Mitchell’s instead of his own. (Greenwell/Mitchell’s inscribed purp

Dear reader, The California Tech is at once delighted and horrified to announce that we have, as of October 2nd of this year, been cited in another publication. Namely, by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a conservative 501©(3) founded in 1987 for the preservation of “Western intellectual heritage.” In other words, we happened to wind up in an alt-right think piece that, while using an LLM to make its

On October 13th, JPL announced that it will lay off roughly 550 employees—about 11 percent of its workforce—in what Lab Director Dave Gallagher described as a “reorganization” effort to “secure JPL’s future” through leaner operations and refocused priorities. The layoffs, affecting staff across technical, business, and support divisions, mark JPL’s fourth major reduction in the past two years, following cuts that eliminated more than 850 p

Correction of the previous issue “Caltech Wildlife: A Welcome Guide”: The caption for the first photo “a mysterious snapping turtle” should actually be “a razor-backed musk turtle.” Many thanks to Hannah Way, the current president of the Caltech turtle club, for pointing that out. According to Hannah, “we have two of these turtles in the pond. They can be identified by their tall and ridged shell with distinc

If you don’t know yet, Caltech’s sex discrimination policy includes a specific clause (Article 15.5) prohibiting any relationship between employees—meaning faculty, postdocs, and staff—and undergraduate students. It also advises caution and professionalism in any relationship where a power imbalance exists. This is where it becomes truly damaging—you start to believe it’s your fault. E

Today, with honor and great enthusiasm, we share the winners of the 2025 Nobel Prizes, announced between October 6 and 13 in Oslo, Norway, and Stockholm, Sweden. The prize is divided into six categories: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Peace, and Economics. Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 The winners are John Clarke, born in 1942 in Cambridge, UK. PhD 1968 from the University of Cambridge, UK. Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. **Michel H. D

How can clay from the Appalachian Mountains, Kilkenny stone from Ireland, and porcelain made in the Song Dynasty come together cohesively? In “the eight directions of the wind” at The Huntington, lauded author and artist Edmund de Waal explores how art made from these materials, among many pieces of porcelain and poetry, connects histories across borders and through time. Edmund de Waal was born in Nottingham, England, in 1964, and is the son of the former Dean of Canterbury, Victor de Waal. At