Science

It took Singapore less than 60 years to transform from a colonial port into one of the world’s fastest growing and most technologically advanced city-states, a feat with few parallels in modern history. But sitting at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, Singapore also finds itself in the middle of rising seas, intensifying heat and erratic rainfall. As a regional hub for finance, technology and policy, the country has drawn a new generation of climate thinkers, engineers and entrepreneurs. Two recent additions to the city are M.A. in Climate and Society alumni Amanda Chen (CS’24) and Anuka Upadhye (CS’25), who moved to the country precisely because it is serious about change and the opportunities therein.  Anuka Upadhye. Credit: Laila Shaaban Upadhye is a policy fellow in en...

Qunnect’s Carina rack for quantum entanglementQunnect Medhi Namazi wants to sell you quantum entanglement. He and his colleagues at Qunnect have spent nearly a decade building devices that make sharing quantum-entangled particles of light, or photons, practical enough to be used for unhackable communication. At Qunnect’s headquarters in Brooklyn, New York, large tables are filled with lasers, lenses, special crystals and other tiny components that researchers use to manipulate light. They are all destined to be neatly packaged into bright magenta boxes and then shipped to other builders of the communication technologies of the future. Against the backdrop of the stunning New York skyline, Namazi opens a box for me, revealing electronics that, at first glance, don’...

Backing up information on quantum computers is trickyRUSLANAS BARANAUSKAS/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Alamy In quantum mechanics, the idea that quantum information can’t be duplicated is ironclad – or at least, it was. A surprising approach to backing up qubits, the basic units of quantum computers, appears to allow a sidestepping of this fundamental law of physics. The no-cloning theorem was first discovered by researchers in the 1980s. It says that quantum states that describe all the information about a system can’t be copied. Attempting to measure the information to copy it would simply destroy the delicate quantum properties that you want to measure. This fact has proved important for quantum technologies like encryption, leading to simple protocols that prevent informa...

Much has been written about how government agencies struggle with community engagement in climate resilience planning. For example, a 2024 study by the Resilient Coastal Communities Project (RCCP) described the enormous frustration felt by communities involved in planning exercises that fail to meaningfully address, let alone prioritize, local needs and experience.  RCCP, a partnership between the Center for Sustainable Urban Development at the Columbia Climate School and the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, published these findings in a 2024 Geoforum article, to give voice to community perspectives on why planners get community engagement wrong. The article also shared 10 community-based ideas for more effective, collaborative planning practice. More recently, RCCP deci...

The United States has supported the World Health Organization (WHO) since its inception, playing a central role in its 1948 creation because it ultimately served American interests, despite the entity’s well-known flaws. Heavily influenced by the post-war notion that universalism was the best corrective to yet another devastating global conflict, 20th century leaders in the U.S. understood that improving global health and containing emergencies were desirable outcomes in and of themselves and would directly reduce health threats to Americans. At the time, the U.S. also recognized that building and maintaining an effective global health infrastructure was beyond its lone capacity. Because no one could predict where new infections would emerge, the world required a truly global surveillance ...