PASADENA -- The Hubble arguably is the most well-known telescope in history, having revived public interest in astronomy and revealed secrets of the universe. Current plans call for shuttle astronauts to return the 12-ton telescope to Earth in 2010, for display in the Smithsonian Institution.

PASADENA -- Six years ago, Ben Weiss spent all night slicing the oldest rock on Earth into pieces the size of a child's fingernail.

LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE -- Mars may fascinate geologists, but the first overview of a year's worth of data from the Mars Odyssey spacecraft suggests that biologists could wind up empty-handed in the search for Martian life. The evidence includes chunks of rock rich with the iron-bearing mineral olivine littering a deep chasm, mile-wide stretches of bare bedrock and broad areas blanketed in a thick layer of dust.

PASADENA -- Though the number of Caltech faculty, staff and researchers has grown more than 40 percent in the past 10 years, the institute today is much like Caltech of the past. The collegial campus atmosphere, the small student body and the freedom to pursue research remain hallmarks, as does Caltech's reputation for producing stellar science.

PASADENA -- When escaping predators is a matter of life and death, prey that eludes an attack is prey that passes on its genes. It doesn't matter if the prey is a laboratory mouse or a human being, evolution appears to have favored animals that have an innate, unlearned reaction to fright.

PASADENA -- Caltech professor Harvey Newman is a high-energy physicist. He is part of a small community of scientists who spend their lives smashing electrons or protons together to reveal the most fundamental particles in nature – astonishingly small yet utterly important things such as quarks and hadrons. As a top researcher in the field, Newman has access to supercolliders that hurl particles at nearly the speed of light. The average experiment produces enough data to fill about 1,000 ten gigabyte hard drives (a ten gigabyte drive is often found in high-end home computers).

PASADENA -- Though an earthquake's first tremors often pass without notice, scientists say they now can estimate the size of coming quakes based on this early bump and rattle an important step toward building an earthquake early warning system in Southern California. With a warning system in place, alarms could give people a few seconds to find shelter, shut down machinery and pipelines, slow trains and abort aircraft landings.

PASADENA -- A sleeping monster beneath Los Angeles has roused four times in the past 11,000 years, producing earthquakes strong enough to devastate downtown Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley. New evidence collected from contorted layers of silt and sand near the San Gabriel River shows that one section of the Puente Hills fault has generated four earthquakes between estimated magnitude 7.2 and 7.5. A small segment of the fault last ruptured in 1987, producing the magnitude-6.0 Whittier Narrows quake.

LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE -- The call came one Friday night at 9 p.m. A tiny resistor had failed on a Mars Exploration Rover destined for launch in May. Scientists at Kennedy Space Center in Florida needed JPL fabrications expert Roberta Cerda to fly out for repairs.

LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE -- Summer has arrived at Mars' north pole, revealing surprisingly thick deposits of water ice, NASA scientists announced Thursday. "There's quite a bit more in the north now than we saw in the south. It might be on the order of 75 percent or more by volume really a huge amount of ice,' said Bill Boynton, a professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

PASADENA -- Since she was a student, astronomer Wendy Freedman has measured speeding stars to calculate how fast the universe expands. By 2000, Freedman was leader of an international team that precisely gauged this expansion rate, known as the Hubble constant.

PASADENA -- Pluto is the runt of the solar system, an icy ball some astronomers don't even consider a true planet. But their opinions are based on fuzzy images -- no man-made objects have ever made the long trip to closely study Pluto. And with a planned Pluto mission recently canceled by the Bush administration, it may be decades before the United States gets a closer look.

PASADENA -- Imagine, if you can, a Pasadena night 100 years ago. Orange blossoms scent the air and stars crowd the sky. No one gazing upward knows other galaxies, an entire universe, hide among the twinkling lights. There's a universe waiting to be discovered.

LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE -- Imagine confidently flying blind through San Francisco's notorious pea soup fog, knowing exactly how high you soar above the ground. Try a similar trip virtually, touring Afghanistan's arid mountains and Costa Rica's rumbling volcanoes on your home computer.