Science

An illustration representing the ultra-thin material grapheneScience Photo Library/Alamy Why do cold thin sheets of carbon offer no resistance to electric currents? Two experiments are bringing us closer to an answer – and maybe even to practical room-temperature superconductors. Kin Chung Fong at Northeastern University in Massachusetts was stunned when another physicist, Abhishek Banerjee at Harvard University, told him a number over dinner. They were studying different aspects of graphene – sheets of carbon only one atom thick – but both made the same estimate about how hard it should be for an electric current flowing through graphene to suddenly change. Past experiments have shown that very cold stacks of two or three layers of graphene can superconduct, or p...

DNA can store digital data, such as visual and audio filesScience Picture Co / Alamy Artificial intelligence can read data stored in DNA strands within 10 minutes rather than the days required for previous methods, bringing DNA storage closer to practical use in computing. “DNA can store vast amounts of data in an extremely compact form and remain intact for thousands of years,” says Daniella Bar-Lev at the University of California, San Diego. “Additionally, DNA is naturally replicable, offering a unique advantage for long-term data preservation.” But retrieving the information encoded within DNA is a monumental challenge because the strands are mixed and jumbled together when stored. During the data-encoding process, individual strands are sometimes replicated im...

Ask someone how the universe began and they will probably reply with those three familiar words: the big bang. But as recently as the 1960s, cosmologists hotly debated this matter. On the other side of the argument to the big bang was the idea of an unchanging “steady state” universe, the density of which was kept the same by continually adding new matter as it expanded. In the end, observations ruled out the idea of a steady state universe and cemented the place of the big bang in the canon of cosmology. That primordial explosion started a process of continual expansion, and today cosmologists view the universe as a place of constant flux. But now a bold group of cosmologists is questioning all that. To be clear, this isn’t a return to the steady state universe,...

As a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999, Elizabeth Kolbert has spent decades informing the reading public about the science of our changing planet, the complicated part humans have played in climate change and the possible solutions for our future. Kolbert has traveled the world in pursuit of these stories, written countless essays and articles, and published several celebrated books, including “The Sixth Extinction,” which won a Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. The Washington Post named her 2021 book, “Under a White Sky,” one of the 10 best books of the year. Kolbert has also won two National Magazine Awards, one National Academies award and the BBVA Biophilia Award for Environmental Communication. On Monday, February 24 , Kolbert will come to the Columbia Climate Scho...

David Parker/Science Photo Library What is the difference between artificial intelligence and quantum computing? One is a sci-fi-sounding technology that has long promised to revolutionise our world, providing researchers can sort out a few technical wrinkles like the tendency to make errors. Actually, so is the other. And yet, while AI appears to have breathlessly and inescapably taken over, well, everything, the average person has had no experience with quantum computing. Does this matter? Practitioners in both fields are certainly guilty of hyping up their wares, but part of the problem for would-be quantum proponents is that the current generation of quantum computers is essentially useless. As we detail in our special report on the state of the industry (see “Quan...