Caltech

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.

Among the 23 scientists and innovators President Obama honored during a White House ceremony Friday were La Cañada Flintridge residents Frances Arnold and Solomon Golomb. Arnold, a chemical engineer and biochemist at Caltech, won a National Medal of Technology and Innovation; Golomb, a mathematician and professor of electrical engineering at USC, received a National Medal of Science. Arnold, 56, was recognized for her pioneering research in biofuels and chemicals that could replace fuel known for generating pollution.

The Los Angeles technology scene isn't getting the respect it deserves, a situation that the city is looking to change, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Wednesday. At an event in West L.A., Villaraigosa said that despite a boom in new start-ups, so-called Silicon Beach still suffers from perception issues and funding problems that have hindered it from reaching its potential as a major tech hub. “We're known as the entertainment capital in the world, but we're not known for Silicon Beach, and that needs to change,” he told a crowd of reporters and tech enthusiasts.

The Particle at the End of the Universe How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World Sean Carroll Dutton: 352 pp., $27.95 On July 4, 2012, at the CERN laboratory in Geneva - home to the massive particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC - two groups of physicists announced the discovery of a new elementary particle, the Higgs boson. Widely known as "the God particle," the Higgs is important, on the most basic level, for giving other subatomic particles mass.

Wallace L.W. Sargent, a Caltech astrophysicist known for his observations of black holes, quasars and other celestial objects at the farthest reaches of the universe, died Oct. 29 at the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles, according to a Caltech spokesman. He was 77 and had been battling prostate cancer. A professor emeritus of astronomy, Sargent arrived at Caltech from his native Britain in 1959 and spent three years as a research fellow. He returned to the university in 1966 as an assistant professor and became a full professor in 1971.

When a 17-year-old high school football player says he wants to apply to Caltech and MIT, everyone should take notice. Alejandro Lupercio, a 6-foot-2, 193-pound senior linebacker at Los Angeles Garfield, has his sights set on becoming a mechanical engineer. "It's not going to be easy, but I can do it," he said. With a 4.2 grade-point average, Lupercio is more than just a key player on the field. He's a tutor for teammates in study hall. When Coach Lorenzo Hernandez needs someone to help with a calculus question, it's usually Lupercio.

Robert F. Christy, a physicist who was a key member of the Manhattan Project team that created the atomic bomb during World War II, died Wednesday at his Pasadena home. He was 96. Christy, who spent 40 years as a Caltech professor and administrator, died of natural causes, the university announced. In 1943, he joined the hundreds of scientists working on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M., to develop the nuclear bomb. He was hand-picked by project director J. Robert Oppenheimer, with whom Christy had studied quantum mechanics at UC Berkeley.

A new theory is pouring some cold - actually, some really hot - water on the idea that Mars could have been habitable in the past. Planetary scientists searching the Red Planet for places that could have contained the building blocks for life look for clues in clays, which can offer some indication that water must have flowed on or just under Mars' surface. But a new study suggests that, at least in some cases, those clays might be a red herring. A paper published online Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience argues that such clays might have been formed in hot Martian magma rich in water.