Science

This story is part of our Cosmic Perspective series, in which we confront the staggering vastness of the cosmos and our place in it. Read the rest of the series here. An astrophysicist and a surgeon walk into a bar. No, this isn’t the start of a bad joke. A few years ago, astrophysicist Franco Vazza met his childhood friend Alberto Feletti, who had become a neurosurgeon. As they reminisced and chatted about their work – Vazza modelling the structure of the universe, Feletti poring over the composition of the brain – a thought struck them: why not compare the two? Vazza, based at the University of Bologna, Italy, did just that. He used statistical methods to compare the neurons in one area of the brain, the cortex, with the cosmic web, the pattern of matter distributio...

The Columbia Climate School is excited to announce a hybrid professional learning workshop this fall: Climate Finance: The Challenges of Transitioning from Funding Climate Change to Funding Net-Zero. Building on the momentum of a successful spring session, this workshop examines the challenges and opportunities of mobilizing trillions of dollars in climate finance to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, focusing on the transition from funding fossil fuels to supporting net-zero efforts. It covers a wide range of topics, including the roles of governments, private sector actors, financial instruments, market failures, ESG and the policies needed to drive the global financial shift. In our interview with the course instructors, Paul DeNoon, senior advisor of executive education at t...

Using DNA for data storage just got much more efficientErkmen Design/Alamy DNA has been used for years to store data, but encoding information into the molecule is painstaking work. Now, researchers have drastically sped it up by mimicking a natural biological process that drives gene expression. This could lead to durable, do-it-yourself DNA data storage technologies. Even though a single gram of DNA can store hundreds of millions of gigabytes of data, the technology to make use of this isn’t yet fully viable. This is partly because the process of encoding data in DNA requires that each molecule be synthesised “from scratch” after being designed to encode a specific piece of information. Long Qian at Peking University in China and her colleagues have now develope...

In March 1974, Stephen Hawking published the paper that made his name. It contained the revelation that black holes – gravitational giants from which nothing, not even light, can escape – don’t grow and grow until the end of time, but instead slowly shrink as they release particles in a phenomenon now called Hawking radiation. The implications were mystifying. Hawking’s calculations showed that the radiation should be random, offering no way to predict what types of particles will emerge. The problem was that anything that falls into a black hole contains information – what sorts of particles it is made of, their configurations, their quantum states – and if what comes back out is random, that information is lost forever as soon as the object is sucked in. But physics...

The scientists at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory have been on the forefront of groundbreaking research in the Earth sciences for the past 75 years, raising awareness of humanity’s growing impact on the natural world—and in turn the natural world’s impact on humanity.   Founded in 1949 as the Lamont Geological Observatory, Lamont has consistently served as an international leader in scientific scholarship. Whether charting the ocean floor, measuring ocean carbon, recording global earthquakes, tracking glacier retreat or counting and decoding tree rings for clues to our planet’s climate history, Lamont researchers are continuing their search for a deeper understanding of our planet. Below are just a few of the historic discoveries from the past seven-and-a-half decades at Lamont-Doh...