Science

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...

Columbia mourns the loss of Edward Botwinick ’56CC, BS’58 and emeritus member of the LDEO Board, who passed away Jan. 24, 2025. Botwinick was an IT entrepreneur, a pioneer in the area of time-division multiplexing and a strong supporter of Columbia University and Columbia Football. Botwinick received his BA in physics from Columbia College in 1956 and his BS in electrical engineering in 1958. He began his career working for US Semiconductor in 1958 and co-founded Silicon Transistor Corp. in 1960. From 1963 to 1967, he served as president and principal shareholder of Quantum Inc., a tape drive and scalable file storage manufacturer. In 1969, Botwinick helped found the data communications firm Timeplex, Inc., which became a leading provider of T1-based networks. For decades, T-1 ba...

On 15 September 2022, Science published the Research Article “Structural basis for strychnine activation of human bitter taste receptor TAS2R46” by W. Xu et al. (1). On 22 November 2022, an Editorial Expression of Concern alerted readers to concerns regarding fig. S10D (1). The authors have now corrected the paper, and the Editorial Expression of Concern has been replaced by an Erratum (3). As described in the Erratum, the authors repeated bioluminescence energy transfer experiments that were the basis for figs. S9, C to F, and S10D. The new data did not provide strong functional support for the structure-based suggestion of precoupling between TAS2R46 and the G protein gustducin. In the corrected version of the Research Article, Xiaoling Cao is no longer an author; figs. S9, C to F, and S...

Optical fibre connected to a dilution refrigeratorHarsh Rathee/Department of Physics Photographs accompanying most scientific papers might politely be called “functional”. But this collection of images from Imperial College London’s research photography competition proves that research can be beautiful. The top image, by Harsh Rathee of the physics department, shows an optical fibre connected to a dilution refrigerator, a device that creates a temperature a thousandth that of the vacuum of space. By observing how light interacts with sound waves at this incredibly low temperature, researchers can explore the unique properties of matter at the quantum level. Liquid GoldAnna Curran/Department of Mathematics The above entry is from Anna Curran of the maths department, wh...