Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and wife Jean, a physicist, bought this Colonial in Chevy Chase for $1.6 million. The renovated house has five bedrooms and four baths. Chu won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1997.

Louis E. Caldera, who resigned his White House job after the Air Force One photo flap, bought a six-bedroom, five-bath Colonial on Darby Road in Bethesda’s Bradley Hills Grove for $1.2 million. Caldera, who was director of the White House Military Office, resigned after an Air Force One photo shoot over Manhattan scared New Yorkers and sparked controversy. Caldera, who approved the photo shoot, was President Clinton’s Secretary of the Army from 1998 to 2001.

Foreign-policy expert Antony Blinken and wife Evan Ryan, a staffer for Vice President Joe Biden, bought a five-bedroom, five-bath Victorian-style rowhouse on Q Street in Georgetown for $2.1 million. The house has pine floors, five fireplaces, and a gourmet kitchen. Blinken is national-security adviser to the Vice President; Ryan, a former Hillary Clinton staffer, works in the Vice President’s intergovernmental-affairs office.