Science

Last week, the Columbia Climate School Signature Speaker Series welcomed Hans Bruyninckx, former executive director of the European Environmental Agency, to talk about “The European Green Deal: The pathway to net-zero emissions in a complex global context.” Bruyninckx gave a primer on the current challenges and opportunities the E.U. is facing when it comes to climate change impact and mitigation—and why what happens next is so important. When his PowerPoint presentation hit an initial snag, Bruyninckx was ready with a quip about how this was lesson number one: “Technology alone is not the solution to climate change.” In all seriousness, “Whatever we do in Europe is based on global scientific assessments and reports that bring science to policy,” he began. “All these reports ...

Adélie penguins in AntarcticaProf. Heather Lynch Artificial intelligence can help accurately map and track penguin colonies in Antarctica by analysing tourist photos. “Right now, everyone has a camera in their pocket, and so the sheer volume of data being collected around the world is incredible,” says Heather Lynch at Stony Brook University in New York. Haoyu Wu at Stony Brook University and his colleagues, including Lynch, used an AI tool developed by Meta to highlight Adélie penguins in photographs taken by tourists or scientists on the ground. With guidance from a human expert, the AI tool was able to automatically identify and outline entire colonies in photos. This semi-automated method is much faster than doing everything manually because the AI tool takes ...

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...