Science

Marcella Petiprin and Andrew Pontius, two seniors from the Undergraduate Program in Sustainable Development (SDEV) program, have completed capstone projects at Columbia’s Climate School. They share some of their experiences and advice for students who wish to pursue an academic career in sustainability. Marcella Petiprin was born in Flint, Michigan, and grew up passionate about the outdoors with a focus on water. Her family owns a Christmas tree farm and she is enthusiastic about giving back to the community. She currently sits on the board of the Flint Classroom Support Fund. What drew you to the sustainable development major or special concentration? I was most excited to discover that the sustainable development curriculum was one that focused on the social and economic fe...

The Quantinuum H2 chipQuantinuum Microsoft and the quantum computing firm Quantinuum claim to have made a quantum computer that has an unprecedented level of reliability. Its ability to correct its own errors could be a step towards more practical quantum computers in the near future. “What we did here gives me goosebumps. We have shown that error correction is repeatable, it is working and it is reliable,” says Krysta Svore at Microsoft. Experts have long anticipated the arrival of practical quantum computers, which could complete calculations that are too complex for conventional computers. Though quantum computers are steadily becoming larger and more complex, this prediction hasn’t yet been fully realised. One big reason for this is that all contemporary quantum co...

“During one kayaking [trip] around the glacier, ice fell onto my kayak. I tried to save this one piece of glacier ice in my freezer. I watered it every day, trying to make it grow. Turns out I wanted to make a story,” said artist and filmmaker Jiabao Li of time spent in Alaska. Inspired by that trip, Jiabao created Once a Glacier, a 15-minute virtual reality (VR) film about a girl and her relationship with a glacier.  A work of climate fiction, Once a Glacier explores a world similar to our own—one with ice sheets that are disappearing as a casualty of climate change. The film traces the journey of a girl as she watches the glaciers around her slowly vanish. We follow her story, as a young girl who discovers the glacier, to her aging into an elderly woman who still protects the decades...

The Emo robot mimics people’s facial expressionsYuhang Hu A humanoid robot can predict whether someone will smile a second before they do, and match the smile on its own face. The creators hope the technology could make interactions with robots more lifelike. Although artificial intelligence can now mimic human language to an impressive degree, interactions with physical robots often fall into the “uncanny valley”, in part because robots can’t replicate the complex non-verbal cues and mannerisms that are vital for communication. Now, Hod Lipson at Columbia University in New York and his colleagues have created a robot called Emo that uses AI models and high-resolution cameras to predict people’s facial expressions and try to replicate them. It can anticipate whet...

A hydrogel disc can increase 100 times in area when stretchedLili Chen et al. A hydrogel that can stretch to around 15 times its initial length is one of the most elastic materials yet known and could be used for robotic grippers or tendons. Hydrogels, which are made of long chain-like polymer molecules linked by water molecules, are well-known for their stretchiness, but they often don’t return to their original shape when they are stretched too much. Lili Chen at Tsinghua University in Beijing and her colleagues have developed a new kind of hydrogel that is extraordinarily stretchy but maintains its original shape. They modified the typical hydrogel structure by inserting what they call pearl-necklace chains, which consist of coiled polymer beads connected by a...