Caltech

Under mottled gray skies, Caltech students graduated Friday in a ceremony punctuated by a moment of silence for two of their colleagues who died in separate suicides in the weeks before commencement. Senior Jackson Ho-Leung Wang, a mechanical engineering student from Hong Kong, died in his dorm room less than 48 hours before he was to collect his diploma in front of Beckman Auditorium on the Pasadena campus, officials said.

A Caltech graduate student convicted five years ago of conspiracy and arson for vandalizing 125 SUVs has had his arson convictions overturned and his sentence vacated by a federal appeals court. William Cottrell, 29, should have been allowed to present evidence during his 2004 trial that his suffering from Asperger's syndrome prevented him from forming the specific intent to commit the arson attacks, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in an amended opinion this week. Cottrell's conspiracy conviction was upheld, but the 100-month prison sentence imposed on him for all of the offenses was vacated.

Combine a land shark with a paddle-wheel boat, spice it with servo motors and radio transceivers, mix with water and what have you got? At Caltech, you have the year's biggest sporting event. At Tuesday's competition, engineering students at the Pasadena campus operated hand-built robots and maneuvered them through an obstacle course that included concrete walkways, a shallow pond and a finish line atop an arching bridge.

Caltech has received an eight-year, $24-million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation to establish a space studies institute dedicated to developing a new generation of space missions and research. The W.M. Keck Institute for Space Studies will consider such sweeping questions as how the universe began, its ultimate fate and the likelihood that life exists elsewhere in the cosmos, Caltech said Tuesday.

Caltech researchers have developed a "microscope on a chip" using an inexpensive lensless magnifying system that relies on a light-sensing chip to achieve the resolving power of a conventional microscope costing thousands of times more. The chip could be incorporated in an iPod-size device that could be used by rural physicians to detect malaria parasites in blood, hikers to identify microbes in stream water, and oncologists to detect cancer cells in the blood of chemotherapy patients.

Intuitive Surgical Inc. was sued by Caltech, which claims the company's da Vinci system for robotic surgery infringes patents held by the university. Irvine-based Intuitive said the lawsuit was without merit and had filed a separate action seeking a declaration that the company wasn't infringing patents.

Take 130 trees dropping olives on campus walkways. Add in students seeking prankish respite from their studies. Mix in a French-born university president with a taste for Mediterranean cuisine. That's the formula for making olive oil at Caltech. The institution better known for rocket science is launching its own brand of the golden kitchen condiment, produced from the trees on its Pasadena campus. A minor flood -- upward of 300 gallons -- is expected this fall.

Public art leads an iffy existence -- subject to weather, vandalism, bureaucratic whimsy or a "public" that greets it with tear-it-down hostility. The demolition of Los Angeles sculptor Lloyd Hamrol's "Moore's Stone Volute," a fixture on the Caltech campus in Pasadena for 12 years, was deliberate ... but carried out with Caltech's regrets.

The relatively modest -- but growing -- number of women at Caltech did not figure much in Hillary Walker's mind when she decided to enroll this fall as a freshman at the prestigious science and engineering campus in Pasadena.

Freshmen arrived at Caltech last week with a question more pressing than the problems of game theory or physics: Where are they going to live? In a tradition known as rotation, freshmen spent their first week of classes living in randomly assigned rooms while they visited the eight dorms on the Pasadena campus for meals and conversation. They ranked their preferences, and in turn the upperclassman rated the freshmen to sort out housing assignments, which were being announced today.