The Graduate Student formal has become the latest casualty of DOGE’s sweeping budget cuts. Fear not, however: the Caltech Rugby Club will be hosting their Annual Ball at the Athenaeum, open to both the blossoming club membership and the wider Graduate Student body. Expect crowd-pleasing music, free flowing food and drink, all set amongst the grandeur of our very own Athenaeum Club.

Spring at Caltech is a season of rapid transformation. Step away for just a few days, and you’ll return to a campus bursting with changes: the once-bare branches are now decorated with colorful flowers. The drastic changes aren’t limited to flora – migrating wildlife also contributes to the seasonal dynamics.

There is a question pulsing quietly beneath the surface of every lab bench, every line of code, every equation scribbled onto a whiteboard: Why are we doing this? Is it for discovery, for prestige, for the betterment of humanity—or something more elusive? At Caltech, we pride ourselves on pushing the boundaries of what is knowable, and we do, no one says the opposite. We decode the stars, manipulate the quantum, edit genes and simulate the brain. But in a world full of complexity, speed, and ambition, can knowledge make us wise? Can science teach us how to live well?

Few Caltech students will take advantage of the opportunity to study abroad during their undergraduate time here. Understandably, undergrads are some of the busiest people you will meet here: classes throughout the day, sports and house activities through the afternoon, problem sets throughout the night and well into the morning, sleep if you can afford it, rinse and repeat. Our four-year plans are often packed; graduating on time is important when your tuition is, to say the least, exorbitant. We are lucky if we have the sheer time management to fit in downtime, much less plan opportunities to exit the Caltech bubble, the boundaries of which are fortified by mediocre public transport and the expense of a car. Throughout my freshman to junior years, I struggled intensely with work-life balance, gradually setting goals to leave campus once a week to control the stress associated with this place.

The Caltech Y regularly organizes Cultural Cuisine Tours across L.A., allowing people to try out new cuisines for a subsidized rate in the presence of a cultural leader, who understands the cuisine and can provide additional information about the food options. Recently, I helped them organize a Cultural Cuisine Tour to Annapurna Grill, specifically to explore South Indian cuisine. And in so doing, I found out just how little people actually knew about South Indian cuisine.

Every year, a million people die of a curable disease. Why haven’t you heard about it? Last year, tuberculosis killed more people than malaria, war, and murder combined. More people than COVID-19 or HIV/AIDS. One-quarter of all people alive today currently have tuberculosis, and every twenty seconds, someone dies from it.

Over the last month, a series of federal funding cuts to scientific research has created disruptions and uncertainty for various agencies and institutions. To learn more about how the federal funding cuts may impact the Institute’s research, the Tech reached out to faculty members who described the uncertainty at this time.

Caltech joined several other leading American research universities in a lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Filed on February 10, the lawsuit challenges what it describes as “a flagrantly unlawful action… that, if allowed to stand, will devastate medical research at America’s universities.”

Woodpeckers are perhaps the most overlooked yet ever-present wildlife species on campus. Like the ubiquitous fox squirrels (a topic for another day), they are a daily sight if you know where to look.

If Democritus were alive today, he’d fit right in at Caltech—probably wandering around campus, laughing at his own jokes, and asking if he could borrow a supercomputer “just to check something.”