Science

An old dense spruce forest in Holma, Sweden. Credit: W.carter, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons Last month, Amanda Biscoe and Pamela Treviño hosted TreeTalks, a film screening and panel discussion focused on rainforest conservation and the role of young people in shaping its future. Through their work as co-directors of Gen Z for the Trees, a program within the Rainforest Partnership, Biscoe and Treviño created the event to bridge generational gaps in conservation and build hope amid growing climate anxiety. Both Biscoe and Treviño are students in the Master of Public Administration in Environmental Science and Policy (MPA-ESP) program, which is offered by Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in partnership with the Columbia Climate School. They opened the evening with two...

US President Donald Trump (left), accompanied by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (right), announces the Golden Dome missile defense shieldCHRIS KLEPONIS/POOL/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock US President Donald Trump has proposed a defence project, called the Golden Dome, to intercept any incoming hypersonic, ballistic and advanced cruise missiles that threaten the country. “Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world and even if they are launched from space,” said Trump during the White House announcement on 20 May. But such a thorough interception system may not be possible. Some experts also warn that, even if it works, the Golden Dome would take at least a decade to build, cost mo...

One of the quietest places in the universe is an unremarkable room on the southern coast of the UK. Here, in one of the University of Southampton’s physics labs, overseen by Hendrik Ulbricht, a preposterous amount of effort has gone into eliminating every conceivable disturbance: a 1-tonne slab of granite absorbs all vibrations aside from the faintest tremors, while a pendulum repurposed from a gravitational wave observatory catches the last leftover wobbles and a fridge lowers temperatures to within a whisker of those in the deepest reaches of outer space. All of this is done in the slim hope we might answer a question that has plagued scientists since the advent of quantum mechanics a century ago. In the microscopic quantum realm, reality seems to work differently t...

Courtesy of Michelle Rozenfeld When I started my internship with the National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP) back in September, I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but I knew what I was hoping for. I wanted to learn how institutions respond to disasters—and where they fall short. I wanted to turn my passion for climate justice into something more tangible than a classroom conversation or a line on my resume. Mostly, I wanted to understand: How do we move people from awareness to action? Over the past year, I’ve had the chance to explore that question through literature reviews, slide decks, grant research, conversations with professors, hurricane impact tracking, blog writing and numerous long Google Docs filled with questions I hoped to answer. And while I don’t have all ...

Physics is tough. Want to spot a ripple in space-time? You just need a detector capable of seeing a length change less than one-millionth the size of an atom. Want to find a Higgs boson? No problem – so long as you have $7 billion, 14 years and 6000 scientists to hand. Still, one experiment is so hard as to make even the cheeriest physicist gulp: testing the idea that gravity is quantum. A theory of quantum gravity is the outstanding goal of modern physics. It would reconcile two currently incompatible pillars of our description of the universe: general relativity, our large-scale theory of gravity; and quantum mechanics, our microscopic account of nature’s other fundamental forces. Individually, these have been thoroughly tested, always passing with flying colours. Y...