Science

This past summer, students from Columbia’s Master of Public Administration in Environmental Science and Policy (MPA-ESP) program participated in an Urban Ecology field trip led by Matthew Palmer, senior lecturer in the department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology at Columbia. The cohort visited three key sites in New York City—Randall’s Island, River Park and Bronx Park East—each serving as a living laboratory where students explored the intersection of natural ecosystems and urban environments. Through hands-on learning and direct observation, students deepened their understanding of the vital role urban ecology plays in fostering sustainable and resilient communities. First Stop: Randall’s Island Anne Wilson explains the public-private partnership that drives Randall...

Large language models are capable of answering a wide range of questions – but not always accuratelyJamie Jin/Shutterstock Large language models (LLMs) seem to get less reliable at answering simple questions when they get bigger and learn from human feedback. AI developers try to improve the power of LLMs in two main ways: scaling up – giving them more training data and more computational power – and shaping up, or fine-tuning them in response to human feedback. José Hernández-Orallo at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, and his colleagues examined the performance of LLMs as they scaled up and shaped up. They looked at OpenAI’s GPT series of chatbots, Meta’s LLaMA AI models, and BLOOM, developed by a group of researchers called BigScience. The research...

Growing up in the US during the oil embargo of the early 1970s, I was bombarded by public service announcements encouraging people to conserve energy. But at a very young age, I also read that “energy is always conserved”, according to physics. This baffled me. If nature automatically conserves energy, why would human efforts to do so be needed? I soon realised that physicists don’t exactly speak English. They employ a dialect full of familiar-sounding terms with unfamiliar meanings (including “conserve” and “energy”). Worse still, many words, including simple ones like “force” and “mass”, don’t even signify what physicists originally intended. Consequently, the language we use to talk about physics obscures some of our most beautiful and fascinating discoveries about...

Last year was the hottest on record. Around the world, we are witnessing more extreme events—from massive forest fires to floods to “hot tub’” ocean temperatures—with devastating consequences for human life and our planet’s biodiversity. The economic costs are already tremendously high. Despite mounting feelings of eco-anxiety, my colleagues and I firmly believe that there is still much that can be done to save our planet.  There is still a lot of uncertainty in climate projections; shortcomings in both climate process understanding and computing capacities limit the accuracy of climate projections needed for optimal adaptation and resilience to climate change. Using AI helps to narrow down the uncertainties in climate modeling that can, in turn, be used to optimize adaptation, and pot...

Long-lasting nuclear batteries could provide power on remote missions like deep-sea explorationEB Adventure Photography/Shutterstock A nuclear battery powered by radioactive decay rather than chemical reactions could last for decades. The most efficient design yet may bring this concept closer to reality. Researchers have wanted to use radioactive atoms to build exceptionally long-lasting and damage-resistant batteries since the 1900s. While some prototypes have been assembled and even used in space missions, they were not very efficient. Now Shuao Wang at Soochow University in China and his colleagues have improved the efficiency of a nuclear battery design by a factor of 8000. They started with a small sample of the element americium, which is usually considered...