Science

Most of us don’t think much about electric charge, apart from in those annoying moments when our phones run out of it. But for physicists, it is a big deal. In every atom, negatively charged electrons orbit a nucleus containing positively charged protons, with the whole dance sustained by their mutual attraction. It would be fair to say, then, that charge is about as fundamental as it gets. This explains why physicists have long been at such pains to understand its nature, and for the most part they have been successful. But there is one question that has always hung in the air, unanswered. It seems that the smallest possible unit of charge is that of an electron – all other naturally occurring particles only have multiples of this. In nature, you can find charges of ...

Olivia Palma and a Shipibo elder in Caimito, Peru, filming a mini-documentary for Emergence Magazine. Photo Credit: Jeremy Seifert Olivia Palma used to think there was a disconnect between her interests in humanitarian work and environmental activism. But after finishing college at Lehigh University, Palma began working with an Indigenous community in Peru on conservation efforts in the Amazon; through this project, she started to understand the inherent overlap between the fields—and where she might be able to lend a hand. As a current student in Columbia Climate School’s M.A. in Climate and Society program, Palma is honing her skills of serving as a knowledge bridge between communities on the ground in Latin America and the policymakers and funders who are collaborating with them ...

A pigeon-inspired robot has solved the mystery of how birds fly without the vertical tail fins that human-designed aircraft rely on. Its makers say the prototype could eventually lead to passenger aircraft with less drag, reducing fuel consumption. Tail fins, also known as vertical stabilisers, allow aircraft to turn from side to side and help avoid changing direction unintentionally. Some military planes, such as the Northrop B-2 Spirit, are designed without a tail fin because it makes them less visible to radar. Instead, they use flaps that create extra drag on just one side when needed, but this is an inefficient solution. Birds have no vertical fin and also don’t seem to deliberately create asymmetric drag. David Lentink at the University of Gronin...

Billions, perhaps trillions, of years from now, long after the sun has engulfed Earth, cosmologists expect the universe will end. Some wrestle with whether it is more likely to collapse under its weight in a big crunch or keep on expanding forever into an infinitely empty big freeze. Others reckon our cosmic endgame will be decided by a mysterious kind of energy that shatters the universe in a big rip. But there is a more immediate cataclysm that may already be barrelling towards us at the speed of light: they call it the big slurp. The slurp in question starts with a quantum fluctuation that sets a bubble rolling across the universe like a cosmic tidal wave, obliterating everything in its path. We should take this possibility seriously, says John Ellis at King’s Coll...

Columbia’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law focuses on four program areas: cross-cutting issues and initiatives, energy law, environmental and land use law, and international and foreign law. As the number of legal efforts involving each of these categories continues to grow, the center has positioned itself as a resource hub for tracking and analyzing global climate change litigation. In a lecture at the Columbia Climate School Research Seminar Series, Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center, discussed the direction climate change cases have taken in the courtroom in recent years—and what these lawsuits may mean for current and future regulation, policy and response. Burger began his presentation with an overview of significant developments in climate litigation,...