Science

Physics is tough. Want to spot a ripple in space-time? You just need a detector capable of seeing a length change less than one-millionth the size of an atom. Want to find a Higgs boson? No problem – so long as you have $7 billion, 14 years and 6000 scientists to hand. Still, one experiment is so hard as to make even the cheeriest physicist gulp: testing the idea that gravity is quantum. A theory of quantum gravity is the outstanding goal of modern physics. It would reconcile two currently incompatible pillars of our description of the universe: general relativity, our large-scale theory of gravity; and quantum mechanics, our microscopic account of nature’s other fundamental forces. Individually, these have been thoroughly tested, always passing with flying colours. Y...

Anar Amarjargal grew up in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia—a city once ranked the most polluted capital in the world. Early on, she knew she wanted to be part of the solution to the complex environmental issues her community faced. After completing an undergraduate degree in environment and development in Japan, Amarjargal is now pursuing her M.A. in Climate and Society at the Columbia Climate School. In the Q&A below, she shares her global journey through sustainable investment, food systems and disaster recovery, and how she came to embrace her diverse but interconnected interests within the climate space. Courtesy of Anar Amarjargal What brought you to the M.A. in Climate and Society program? After undergrad, I knew I wanted to deepen my understanding of environmental science and ...

A secure quantum internet could be on the wayvs148/Shutterstock Another step towards a quantum internet has been completed, and it doesn’t require any special communications equipment. Two data centres in Germany have exchanged quantum secure information using already existing telecommunication fibres at room temperature. This is in contrast to most quantum communications, which often require cooling to extremely low temperatures to protect quantum particles from disturbances in their environment. The quantum internet, where information can be exchanged extremely securely thanks to being encoded into quantum particles of light called photons, is quickly making forays into the world outside the lab. In March, a microsatellite enabled a quantum link between ground statio...

One chilly morning this past December, nine women awoke to the sight of a glacier looming before them, glowing orange in the rising sun. These scientists had spent their lives studying the cryosphere—the frozen part of the Earth—but most had never encountered it in person.  The members of this group were selected as the first cohort of the Hindu Kush Himalaya HKH Women on Ice expedition, an initiative recently launched by the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). ICIMOD is a Nepal-based NGO focused on the conservation and sustainability of mountain regions in Asia. For this expedition, women from five countries traveled to the Ponkar Glacier in the Gandaki River basin in Nepal.  Participants descend from Bhimtang to Goa after the snow. Courtesy of Silian ...

For over a decade, floating cranes have been lowering a strange cargo some 3000 metres under the Mediterranean Sea. The objects look otherworldly: large, shiny spheres crammed with electronics. They are, in fact, detectors for a machine called KM3NeT, designed to search for one of the most mysterious fundamental particles. The machine is still several years from completion, so Paschal Coyle got quite a shock when, in 2023, he spotted a dramatic signal in its preliminary data. It was a neutrino, as expected, but one unlike anything ever seen before. “When I first tried looking at this event, my program crashed,” says Coyle, a physicist at the Centre for Particle Physics of Marseille, France. KM3NeT had detected a neutrino from space that had about 35 times more en...