• Conduct independent research in an area compatible with the interests of the sponsoring laboratory
• Devote full-time effort to research and publication
• Access the excellent and often unique facilities of the federal research enterprise
• Collaborate with leading scientists and engineers at the sponsoring laboratories

Ten years ago this week, two international collaborations of groups of scientists, including a large contingent from Caltech, confirmed that they had found conclusive evidence for the Higgs boson, an elusive elementary particle, first predicted in a series of articles published in the mid-1960s, that is thought to endow elementary particles with mass.

So-called fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are pulses of radio waves that typically originate millions to billions of light-years away (radio waves are electromagnetic radiation like the light we see with our eyes but have longer wavelengths and frequencies). The first FRB was discovered in 2007, and since then, hundreds more have been found. In 2020, Caltech's STARE2 instrument (Survey for Transient Astronomical Radio Emission 2) and Canada's CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) detected a massive FRB that went off in our own Milky Way galaxy. Those earlier results helped confirm the theory that the energetic events most likely originate from dead, magnetized stars called magnetars.