Caltech

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Tuesday said it planned to appeal a National Labor Relations Board judge's order to rescind disciplinary actions against five engineers and scientists. "Caltech respectfully disagrees with the decision and intends to appeal," JPL spokeswoman Veronica McGregor said in a brief statement. Administrative Law Judge William G. Kocol had ordered JPL, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology for NASA, to remove disciplinary letters from the employee files of the five.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Tuesday said it planned to appeal a National Labor Relations Board judge's order to rescind disciplinary actions against five engineers and scientists. "Caltech respectfully disagrees with the decision and intends to appeal," JPL spokeswoman Veronica McGregor said in a brief statement. Administrative Law Judge William G. Kocol had ordered JPL, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology for NASA, to remove disciplinary letters from the employee files of the five.

The fanfare that accompanied Stephen Hawking's entrance into Caltech's Beckman Auditorium on Tuesday evening was at once cosmologically grand and a bit tongue-in-cheek. It was Richard Strauss' 1896 “Thus Spake Zarathustra," more familiar to modern audiences as the theme music for “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It brought the 500 people inside to their feet for the rock-star cosmologist with crossover va va voom from “The Simpsons” and “The Big Bang Theory.”   Hawking first visited Caltech in 1974, and he has been a visiting professor and speaker almost every year since 1991.

Jordan Hassay worked overtime Monday so he could leave his office early on Tuesday to watch Stephen Hawking speak at Caltech. By the time Hassay, 26, drove from Hollywood to the Pasadena campus, the line outside Caltech's Beckman Auditorium, which started forming at 8 a.m., was hundreds deep. The famed theoretical physicist wasn't scheduled to go on until 8 p.m. He eventually found himself outside the 1,100-person capacity auditorium in an overflow space to watch Hawking give a lecture on the origins of the universe and answer questions from Caltech students.

The president of Caltech, Jean-Lou Chameau, announced Tuesday that he would step down from the leadership of the prestigious science- and math-oriented campus in Pasadena at the end of the current school year and become head of a new and well-endowed university in Saudi Arabia. Chameau, a French-born civil engineer, has been president of Caltech since 2006 and helped the school maintain its high international academic rankings and achieve greater financial stability during a recessionary period of retrenchment at many other colleges, education experts said.

FAMILY The Emmy Award-winning kid's science show "Beakman's World" comes to life, this time to explore the inner-workings of the human brain. Starring Paul Zaloom, the performance is chock-full of wacky humor, large-scale demonstrations and plenty of audience participation. Beckman Auditorium. 332 S. Michigan Ave, Pasadena. 7 p.m. Fri. $15 for adults, $10 for kids. (626) 395-4652. http://www.caltech.edu

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.

In a move to expand the small but prestigious math and science school, Caltech is preparing to relocate a campus child-care center to make way for a new dorm. But neighbors in the tony Pasadena neighborhood are complaining that the new site is too close to their homes and would create a traffic nightmare. Such town-gown issues are common in Southern California, where schools and universities share valuable stretches of real estate with their residential neighbors. The institutions are in a constant arms race to both attract students and find ways to accommodate them - leading to frequent clashes with the communities that surround them.

Caltech has received a $1-million grant from IBM to establish an IBM Research Fund for faculty members and to further science education programs for college and high school students.

Canon Inc. and Nikon Corp. were sued by Caltech and accused of infringing six patents related to pixel sensors used in digital cameras. In the lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court in Tyler, Texas, Caltech is seeking an order stopping the infringement and requests unspecified damages. Olympus Corp., Panasonic Corp., Sony Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. also were accused of infringement by the Pasadena school.

Stephen Hawking's Southern California lecture series continues Tuesday night at Caltech's Beckman Auditorium, where the renowned theoretical physicist will discuss the big bang, black holes and more in a lecture titled "The Origin of the Universe. " The event is free and open to the public, with 500 seats available on a first-come, first-served basis. Tickets will be handed out as early as 6:45 p.m. An overflow audience can watch the talk on a live video feed elsewhere on campus.

In the seismic annals of California, Monday's magnitude 4.7 earthquake was little more than a footnote. It gave Southern California a small morning jolt but caused no damage and was largely shrugged off by noon. But in one important way, the quake was highly significant because it marked an advance in California's burgeoning earthquake early warning system. The quake struck in the desert town of Anza, about 35 miles south of Palm Springs, and hundreds of sensors embedded in the ground immediately sent an alert to seismologists at Caltech in Pasadena.

For most people, March 14 is just another day. But for math fans and self-proclaimed nerds out there, the day - or, more specifically, the fact that it is 3/14 - is a day to celebrate one of the most important numbers in all of mathematics: pi. So what better way for pi fans to celebrate Pi Day than with … pie? A minute before 2 a.m. on Thursday, students at Caltech in Pasadena dug into 130 pies laid out for them outside student housing. There were 26 each of five different kinds of pie. Follow that?

The MIT students were stumped, or as stumped as a group of young adults with SAT scores dwarfing the average mortgage payment could be when faced with the question: Is it ever acceptable to dunk? Quiet settled over the roomful of round tables, where not a backward cap, gum-chomping jaw nor buzzing, bleeping or chirping cellphone was to be seen. A young woman's voice emerged from the back with the answer that etiquette expert Dawn Bryan was hoping to hear: "Basically, you don't dunk unless it's biscotti.

In a move to expand the small but prestigious math and science school, Caltech is preparing to relocate a campus child-care center to make way for a new dorm. But neighbors in the tony Pasadena neighborhood are complaining that the new site is too close to their homes and would create a traffic nightmare. Such town-gown issues are common in Southern California, where schools and universities share valuable stretches of real estate with their residential neighbors. The institutions are in a constant arms race to both attract students and find ways to accommodate them - leading to frequent clashes with the communities that surround them.

The president of Caltech, Jean-Lou Chameau, announced Tuesday that he would step down from the leadership of the prestigious science- and math-oriented campus in Pasadena at the end of the current school year and become head of a new and well-endowed university in Saudi Arabia. Chameau, a French-born civil engineer, has been president of Caltech since 2006 and helped the school maintain its high international academic rankings and achieve greater financial stability during a recessionary period of retrenchment at many other colleges, education experts said.

Caltech has a new all-weather track and field named for the athletic director who served from 1921 to 1942 and coached football teams that twice became Southern California Conference champions. The Fox Stanton Track and Field was dedicated Dec. 5 by Caltech officials and the board of directors of the Lon V. Smith Foundation, which provided the $450,000 for the new facility on Wilson Avenue. The gift was made with the support of Dr. W. Layton Stanton, son of W. L.