Science

Starlings perched in a motion-capture lab built inside a converted barnChristian Zeigler An animal behaviour lab built inside a converted barn uses motion-capture cameras to track the movements and behaviours of entire flocks of birds or swarms of insects. The so-called SMART-BARN resembles a Hollywood motion-capture studio with 30 infrared cameras capable of tracking up to 500 individual markers attached to animal’s bodies. All of this takes place within an area one quarter the size of a standard basketball court, and which can include feeding stations and animal perches. “We have a very high precision and controllable environment, but with large enough volume for the animals to move and interact much as they do in nature”, says Máté Nagy at the Max Planck Institute o...

Oxygen-28 has 8 protons and 20 neutronsCarlos Clarivan/Science Photo Library The heaviest version of oxygen ever created falls apart mysteriously quickly. This finding implies a problem with our understanding of a fundamental force of nature. Yosuke Kondo at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan and his colleagues created oxygen-28 – an isotope of oxygen with eight protons and 20 neutrons – by smashing an energetic beam of fluorine atoms into liquid hydrogen. The fluorine atoms each had 20 neutrons and nine protons. When they collided with the liquid hydrogen, they each lost a proton, turning the atoms into oxygen-28. The researchers expected these atoms to be stable. But instead, they found that they only existed for about a zeptosecond, or trillionth of a billio...

Updates on the Climate School Student Government Saxon Stahl, a master’s candidate in the Climate and Society program, founded the Columbia Climate Graduate Council, which is the official student government of the Columbia Climate School. They helped to write a constitution and bylaws that will empower students and promote representation and equity across the Climate School and university campus.  In the Q&A below, Stahl shares more about the Climate School student government, projects and initiatives the organization has been working on, and plans for expansion in the fall 2023 semester. What is the Columbia Climate Graduate Council?It’s a centralized sour...

Artistic illustration of an Alice ring, which has been observed for the first timeHeikka Valja/Aalto University Physicists have peered through the proverbial looking glass, and the atoms on the other side belong to a world of opposites. For the first time, researchers have made an exotic quantum object called an Alice ring, which changes the properties of other quantum objects when they pass through it – or when they are simply viewed through it. Quantum systems – such as collections of very cold atoms, or even our whole universe – should theoretically contain odd objects called topological defects. Some are like long strings, and others are stranger still: Zero-dimensional dots, at the centre of which things like magnetic fields become mathematically impossible to des...

Meet Dasom Shi From the Climate and Society Class of 2024 by Kayley Beard |August 25, 2023 The Columbia Climate School is excited to welcome 100 new students to the MA in Climate and Society program this fall. This 12-month, interdisciplinary program trains students to understand and address the impacts of climate change and climate variability on society and the environment. The new cohort brings a diverse group of students from 24 countries with various professional and academic backgrounds. State of the Planet is featuring interviews with several of these new students. Below, we speak with Dasom Shi, a professional in ...