Science

The Masters in Public Administration (MPA) program in Environmental Science and Policy at Columbia University is looking to hire teaching assistants (TAs) for its summer 2024 courses. The following positions are available: Environmental Chemistry and Toxicology/Risk Assessment (3 TA positions) Climatology and Hydrology (3 TA positions) Principles of Ecology and Urban Ecology (3 TA positions) Time Commitment and Responsibilities:The total semester-long time commitment expected for these positions will be equivalent to approximately 240 hours (avg of 20 hrs/week) and the pay level is $13,368 for the summer. The time commitment generally consists: of a three-hour morning lecture which TAs will attend, followed by two afternoon lab sections (each 2.5 hours in length) that the TA...

A miniature chair and table 3D printed from waste woodThakur et al., Sci. Adv. 10, eadk3250 (2024) Recycled wood can be turned into an ink for 3D printing, which could offer a more sustainable way to manufacture furniture or even build houses. “Wood has been used for building and structural purposes for centuries,” says Muhammad Rahman at Rice University in Texas. But working with the material isn’t especially efficient, as chiselling it down to size can result in lots of waste. To make use of this leftover material, Rahman and his colleagues split it into lignin and cellulose – molecules that are key to the stiff structure of wood – and these were broken down to form nanofibres and nanocrystals. They then recombined the cellulose and lignin with water to make a ...

Inside the JET fusion reactorEUROfusion The UK’s 40-year-old fusion reactor achieved a world record for energy output in its final runs before being shut down for good, scientists have announced. The Joint European Torus (JET) in Oxfordshire began operating in 1983. When running, it was temporarily the hottest point in the solar system, reaching 150 million°C. The reactor’s previous record was a reaction lasting for 5 seconds in 2021, producing 59 megajoules of heat energy. But in its final tests in late 2023, it surpassed this by sustaining a reaction for 5.2 seconds while also reaching 69 megajoules of output, using just 0.2 milligrams of fuel. This equates to a power output of 12.5 megawatts – enough to power 12,000 homes, said Mikhail Maslov of th...

About two years after releasing its draft regulation, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has at long last issued its final climate disclosure rule. Last year, I convened a group of faculty from Columbia’s Master of Sustainability Management program to design a set of new courses to respond to this coming change. This year we offered three new courses on the topic, adding to existing courses in Corporate Sustainability Reporting, Greenhouse Gas Measurement, and Life Cycle Assessment. This past fall, we held a panel discussion on the issue, which also focused on environmental reporting requirements in California and the European Union. Earlier this year I wrote about the importance of the SEC’s climate disclosure regulation. While the new rule is controversial, it is also an impor...

Hundreds of millions of people already use commercial AI chatbotsJu Jae-young/Shutterstock Commercial AI chatbots demonstrate racial prejudice toward speakers of African American English – despite expressing superficially positive sentiments toward African Americans. This hidden bias could influence AI decisions about a person’s employability and criminality. “We discover a form of covert racism in [large language models] that is triggered by dialect features alone, with massive harms for affected groups,” said Valentin Hofmann at the Allen Institute for AI, a non-profit research organisation in Washington state, in a social media post. “For example, GPT-4 is more likely to suggest that defendants be sentenced to death when they speak African American English.” Hofmann...