Caltech

The Supreme Court gave a skeptical hearing Tuesday to 28 scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge who are challenging the government's use of background checks to learn about their personal lives, including past drug use. Their case raises a potentially broad question that affects millions of public employees and a growing army of private contract workers. Does the Constitution protect the personal privacy of government employees and job applicants?

UC Santa Barbara, according to old stereotypes, may still conjure up the image of a lush campus by the beach, where students can squeeze in a few hours of surfing after class and live in a nearby neighborhood that is one of the nation's best-known party zones. But in reality, UC Santa Barbara over the last three decades increasingly has become a center of scientific research, and its move in that direction was strengthened Saturday with the announcement of a $50-million private donation to energy efficiency research and engineering programs.

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.

Thanks to a new method of modeling earthquakes, scientists may now understand why the Parkfield segment of the San Andreas fault - a carefully studied region known for producing moderate temblors every 20 years or so - has been behaving unexpectedly since around the time Ronald Reagan was in the White House. Taking data collected by sensors on the ground and in space and combining them with observations from laboratory physics experiments, Caltech researchers conducted a computer simulation of tectonic events at Parkfield and discovered that a series of small quakes there may have staved off a larger shaker that geologists predicted would occur in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

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

It was the last chance in the last game of the last basketball season Ryan Elmquist would ever experience, and the boy wonder wondered. He recorded a perfect score on his ACT exam. He is graduating from Caltech this spring with a computer science degree. He has landed a job as a software engineer at Google. But could he make a free throw? Could he make one unguarded shot to give the Caltech basketball team a victory that would end a 310-game conference losing streak stretched back 26 years?

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.

If some L.A.-area teachers wondered where their students were Tuesday, maybe they can blame Stephen Hawking. With his computerized voice, motorized wheelchair and an intellect that seems to leave mortal men far behind, Hawking is one of the best-known physicists ever. Die-hard fans, many of them youthful, started lining up early in the morning to get coveted free tickets to hear him speak at Caltech Tuesday night, school be damned. FOR THE RECORD: Stephen Hawking: A Jan. 19 article in LATExtra on a talk at Caltech given by physicist Stephen Hawking said he has a form of muscular dystrophy that is related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Jacqueline K. Barton, a Caltech chemistry professor who has pushed the boundaries of DNA research, has been awarded the National Medal of Science, becoming the first woman at the Pasadena campus to receive what is considered the U.S. government's highest honor to scientists, officials announced Tuesday. Barton was one of seven recipients of this year's medal, a prize that her husband, Peter Dervan, also a Caltech chemist, won in 2006. Administrators of the prize, which was first awarded in 1962, said they were not aware of any other husband and wife who had both received it. The White House cited Barton for the discovery of a new property of the DNA helix and experiments on long-range electron transfers.

On a recent day at Caltech's Brown Gymnasium, the wild cheers of victory this time were for the home team this time. But then again the basketball team had a couple of ringers -- Los Angeles Lakers Pau Gasol and Jordan Farmar -- and it was, after all, a television show. The NBA players visited the Pasadena campus -- famous for its brilliant scientific minds as well as its notorious athletic losing streaks -- to guest star in an episode of CBS' crime drama "Numb3rs," which airs at 10 tonight.

Hollywood's full of interesting figures with dreams - struggling actors and writers who wait tables, walk dogs or sell insurance on the side. In the 1980s and early '90s, Leonard Mlodinow was likely one of the most unexpected: a theoretical physicist-turned-scriptwriter. When TV action hero MacGyver or the Starship Enterprise crew needed new dilemmas to solve, the UC Berkeley-trained scientist was there to supply them. "I just really loved films and thought I should be writing screenplays," said the bestselling science writer on a recent sunny afternoon at Caltech, where he's a lecturer.

Two California researchers whose groundbreaking work has documented the dangers of air pollution have been awarded the 2012 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. John H. Seinfeld, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech, was recognized for research leading to a greater understanding of the origin, chemistry and evolution of particles in the atmosphere. Seinfeld's work has helped foster efforts to control the effects of air pollution on public health. Seinfeld's recent work includes research into how soot billowing from diesel trucks and industrial smokestacks contributes to climate change and how biogenic emissions from plants and trees affects air quality.

Roy J. Britten, a Caltech biologist who discovered that the mammalian genome includes large quantities of repetitive DNA sequences that do not serve as blueprints for genes, has died. He was 92. Britten, who had pancreatic cancer, died Jan. 21 at his home in Costa Mesa, Caltech announced. Britten and molecular biologist Eric Davidson, a Caltech colleague, also played a key role in the development of the field of evolutionary developmental biology, which demonstrated that most of the differences between species arise from changes in how similar genes are regulated, rather than from mutations in the genes themselves.

The gig: Gil Elbaz is founder and chief executive of Factual Inc., a Century City company that aggregates and organizes huge amounts of online data. Factual, started in 2007, has attracted $25 million in venture funding. Claim to fame: He co-founded Applied Semantics Inc., which built technology that connects related online content. Google used it to create its landmark AdSense product that automatically displays advertisements based on a Web page's content. Google bought Applied Semantics in 2003 for $102 million.

Julia Sampson Hayward Champion tennis player in 1950s Julia Sampson Hayward, 77, a champion tennis player who won the women's doubles and mixed doubles titles at the 1953 Australian Open, died Tuesday at her home in Newport Beach of complications from a fall, her family said. Known as both Julie Sampson and Julia Sampson while playing at the national and international level, she had her best season in 1953. At the Australian Open, she teamed with Maureen Connolly to win women's doubles and with Rex Hartwig to win mixed doubles.

Who hasn't caught a snowflake in a mitten and marveled at its star-like detail, and then recalled that no two snowflakes are alike? But these crystals of ice are even more varied than one might imagine — there are needle-like snowflakes, hollow-column snowflakes and flakes that look like delicate dumbbells, with two joined together by a column. Caltech physicist Kenneth Libbrecht, who studies the crystalline structure of snowflakes and has published seven books of snowflake photographs, talked to The Times about what we do, and don't, know about 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.

The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva succeeded early Tuesday in smashing subatomic particles together at more than three times the highest levels previously recorded, eliciting cheers from a crowd watching at Caltech and pushing two sometimes-separate strains of particle physicists together in what is likely to be a show of things to come. Under two clocks, one labeled "Geneva" and another labeled "Caltech," Bertrand Echenard and Matthew Buckley passed midnight with pizza, discovering that they both studied high-energy cosmic ray particle collisions.

One day in 1948, Caltech chemistry professor Arie Haagen-Smit took a break from trying to decipher the mystery of the flavor of the pineapple. He stepped outside his lab for a breath of fresh air but instead found himself enveloped in what he called "that stinking cloud" of smog. At the time, there was a bitter debate as to what caused smog. So Haagen-Smit decided to put aside his pineapples (he had already worked out the taste chemistry of onions, garlic and wine and had identified the active agent in marijuana)

They researched how protons transfer within DNA. They argued for alternative energy sources. They studied breast cancer and considered how to make its treatment more effective. And they haven't even graduated from high school yet. Saturday in Pasadena, a sharp group of local students competed in the Super Bowl of science, vying for thousands of dollars in prize money and recognition for their research. David Cheng of Calabasas, Manoj Kanagaraj of Chino Hills, Daniel Chiou of Hacienda Heights and Barry Chen of Walnut were four of the 15 teenagers who spent the day at CalTech, getting peppered by professors about their work.