Science

On March 4, 2025, experts from diverse fields gathered at Columbia University to explore major questions in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence at the inaugural Columbia AI Summit. Covering topics from healthcare, business and policy, to the sciences, engineering and the humanities, the summit offered a 360-degree view of AI’s transformative impact on society. Featuring Climate School researchers, the afternoon session, From Chaos to Code: How AI Can Tame the Climate Crisis, addressed how AI is emerging as a powerful tool in climate science, disaster preparedness and building resilience across interconnected systems. Read on for highlights from the session or watch the video below. Photo: Eileen Barroso/Columbia University Speakers Introduc...

Microsoft’s Majorana 1 quantum computerJohn Brecher/Microsoft Last month Microsoft announced, with fanfare, that it had created a new kind of matter and used it to make a quantum computer architecture that could lead to machines “capable of solving meaningful, industrial-scale problems in years, not decades”. But since then, the tech giant has increasingly come under fire from researchers who say it has done nothing of the sort. “My impression is that the response of the expert physics community has been overwhelmingly negative. Privately, people are just outraged,” says Sergey Frolov at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Microsoft’s claim rests on elusive and exotic quasiparticles called Majorana zero modes (MZMs). These can theoretically be used to crea...

For Alan Barr, it started during the covid-19 lockdowns. “I had a bit more time. I could sit and think,” he says. He had enjoyed being part of the success at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland — the particle collider that discovered the Higgs boson. But now, he wondered, were they missing a trick? “I had spent long hours screwing bits of it together. And I thought, ‘Well, we’ve built this beautiful piece of apparatus, but maybe we could be doing more with it,’ ” he says. The LHC is typically seen as a machine for finding new particles. But now Barr and a slew of other physicists are asking if it can also be used to probe the underlying meaning of quantum theory and why it paints reality as being so deeply weird. That’s exactly what Barr and hi...

As a climate scientist with over 25 years of experience, Anders Carlson understands the significant loss Oregon’s glaciers are facing. In 2020, this awareness led him to found the Oregon Glaciers Institute (OGI), a nonprofit institute run by a core group of volunteers, to research glacial health and inform the Oregon public about the far-reaching impacts of glacial loss in the state. In November 2024, OGI published its four-year impact report. The report underscores the danger facing Oregon’s glaciers. In 2021, OGI completed a field-based count of glaciers and determined that the state had 60 individual “flowing ice bodies” as recently as the 1970s. Now, only 27 remain. Oregon Glaciers Institute members conducting field work on Jefferson Park Glacier. Photo courtesy of Nicolas Bakken...

Hydrogels with a taste are administered into the mouth via a small tubeShulin Chen An electronic tongue that can replicate flavours like cake and fish soup could help recreate food in virtual reality, but can’t yet simulate other things that influence taste, such as smell. Yizhen Jia at The Ohio State University and his colleagues have developed a system, called e-Taste, that can sample a food and work out how to partly recreate its flavour in someone’s mouth. This involves using chemicals that correspond to the five basic tastes: sodium chloride for salty, citric acid for sour, glucose for sweet, magnesium chloride for bitter and glutamate for umami. “Those five flavours are already accounting for a very large spectrum of the food we have daily,” says Jia. The sy...