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Klaus Lackner’s approach to slowing global warming is to clean up the atmosphere—literally. In his lab at Columbia's Engineering School, Lackner is working on technology to scrub carbon dioxide from the air, reducing levels of the harmful greenhouse gas that plays a major role in the increase of the Earth’s temperature. “We need ways of getting the carbon dioxide, which is emitted by the combustion of fossil fuels, back,” says Lackner, the Ewing and J. Lamar Worzel Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, and the director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at the Earth Institute. Lackner and Allen Wright, senior staff associate at the Lenfest Center, are developing artificial trees that will pull carbon dioxide from the air, just as real trees do. Their air capture machines are like giant filters that trap the carbon dioxide, which can later be freed and compressed to liquid carbon dioxide. Together with water and energy the carbon dioxide can be used as feed stock for synthetic fuels. Another alternative would be to safely sequester it deep below the Earth’s surface. On a smaller scale, Lackner and Wright recently demonstrated how the technology can be used to supply carbon dioxide to greenhouses to maintain healthy plant growth. The filters pick up carbon dioxide in the outside air when dry; then release it when exposed to the damp, humid conditions found in a greenhouse. “In the long term, we need to collect so much carbon dioxide to solve the climate change problem, and the greenhouses are a step on the way,” Lackner says. “Our goal is to use this to demonstrate you can really capture carbon dioxide and that you can do it at an affordable level.” —Story by Beth Kwon —Video by Columbia News Video Team

Columbia and Columbians have long been working across many regions in Africa, from the Mailman School’s leadership of AIDS/HIV programs and the Earth Institute’s research on sustainable development to the many scholars of African history and politics, culture and society. But with the opening of the University’s Global Center in Nairobi, Kenya, faculty, students, alumni and friends will have a new home base for engaging with the people, ideas and complex issues that confront a continent undergoing profound change. The Jan. 14 dedication and discussion event was big news in Africa, attended by leaders of several nations, including Mwai Kibaki, president of Kenya; Hailemariam Desalegn, Ethiopia’s prime minister; Salva Kiir Mayardit, president of South Sudan; Margaret Kamar, Kenya’s minister of higher education; and Ahmed Ali Silay, Djibouti’s vice minister of foreign affairs. “Each opening of a Columbia Global Center holds great promise, not only for new academic partnerships in the host nation and region, but also for the continuing reinvention of Columbia’s home campuses in New York City, where our scholarly mission demands a global presence,” Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger said in his welcoming remarks. The global centers promote and facilitate international collaborations, research projects, academic programming and study abroad, enhancing the University’s historic commitment to global scholarship and problem solving. In addition to Nairobi, Columbia has opened centers in Amman, Beijing, Istanbul, Mumbai, Paris, and Santiago, Chile. In March, it will officially inaugurate the center in Rio de Janeiro. The dedication program in Nairobi featured panel discussions including \"Impacts of the Press and Media on Democracy in the Region,\" \"Pathways to Sustainable Development in Africa, and Health—Now and Future.\" Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of Columbia’s Earth Institute, moderated the panel on development while Lee Goldman, dean of Columbia’s Faculties of Health Science and Medicine, led the discussion on health along with Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology at Mailman School of Public Health. In his remarks, Bollinger spoke of why the University was opening a center in Nairobi now. “Kenya’s embrace of higher education underscores that the core values of great universities—including a belief in the power of dialogue to reveal truth—stand also at the center of Kenyan society.” Safwan M. Masri, Columbia’s vice president for global centers, underscored the interactive and collaborative nature of the venture. “We have no preconceived notions and don’t pretend to have answers. We’re here to learn from you,” he said. The Nairobi center, in a modern, 14,000-square-foot building with videoconferencing facilities and a library, will serve as home base and support center for a number of projects already underway. Later this year, with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the center will implement the second phase of the Africa Soil Information Service, dedicated to improving soil and land management. It is also the base for the Millennium Villages, launched in 2005 by the Earth Institute to help rural Africa achieve U.N. Millennium Development Goals; the Drylands Initiative, a six-country program to boost the capacity of communities in drought-prone areas of Africa; and a variety of projects with Columbia’s Engineering School. Additional programming discussions are underway with the Mailman School of Public Health, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and Teachers College. But the central mission of the Global Centers is to allow Columbia faculty and students themselves to develop ideas for collaborations across traditional academic disciplines and national boundaries. While some U.S. universities have built branch campuses and degree-granting schools abroad, Columbia has focused on establishing smaller, flexible hubs for a wide range of activities and resources. Over time these are intended to enhance the quality of research and learning at the University, as well as making a Columbia presence accessible to people and partners, including its own alumni, around the world. “The research and teaching at the Columbia Global Center in Nairobi will help to address global problems by providing perspectives and evidence from Africa,” said Belay Ejigu Begashaw, director of the Nairobi center, “while also supporting African policy makers, governments, civil society, and regional institutions in developing solutions specific to this continent’s greatest challenges, including the fight against poverty.” —by Columbia News Staff

Since the global financial meltdown of 2008, a great debate has ensued over how best to regulate Wall Street’s excesses. What better format, then, to address such a thorny topic than the role-playing Socratic dialogue pioneered by the late Fred Friendly, former president of CBS News and a longtime professor and legend at Columbia Journalism School? Last fall a panel of high-powered finance experts—including bank executives, regulators, politicians, journalists and a Nobel laureate in economics—assembled at Columbia’s Miller Theatre to participate in a panel titled “Financial Innovation: A Risky Business?” It was moderated by Robert J. Jackson Jr., associate professor of law and a co-director of the Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership at Columbia Law School, who guided panelists through hypothetical scenarios that delved into the problems, choices and decision-making processes of key players in the financial collapse. The discussion was sponsored by the Business School’s Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics. Bruce Kogut, the Sanford C. Bernstein Professor of Leadership and Ethics and director of the Bernstein Center, noted that even as the financial crisis recedes into history, “there is still a great deal of confusion about the role of finance and the value of finance in the economy.” “We wanted to provide a balanced approach to the discussion,” he said. “It was not only about the past but about the future.” The recently released video of the seminar, edited down to about an hour, has already received tens of thousands of hits on YouTube. It will be broadcast on PBS at a date still to be determined. In one role-play, Bruce Greenwald, the Robert Heilbrunn Professor of Finance and Asset Management, and Ed Conard, a former managing director of Bain Capital, were assigned to portray managers of “magnificently successful” hedge funds faced with deciding which of two employees of a big bank to hire. Greenwald and Conard agreed that neither candidate was ideal for the job. But the comments the make-believe job applicants made about their current employer’s recent sale of securities to small community banks led to a larger discussion of the responsibilities of securities buyers and sellers and the need for regulation. “Banks are institutions that lend and lending affects what happens in the economy,” said Robert Solow, a Nobel Prize winner in economics and professor emeritus at M.I.T. “When a bank goes down, a whole lot of transactions are in trouble. “One panelist was Barney Frank, former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and co-author of the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act. “People thought they had found a way to hide risk, to pass risk along. They thought they could make risk disappear,” he said. New rules seek to “keep people from making risky decisions for which they are not accountable and getting other people to back them up.” Most of the panel said banks should be allowed to fail and many said smaller banks would be better. “Too big to fail is too big,” stated David Abrams, managing director of Abrams Capital. Solow agreed, saying there is no evidence that big banks offer economies of scale and that there would be no adverse consequences to breaking them up. Others weren’t so sure. “It’s a tough decision,” said \"New York Times\" columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, noting that smaller banks in the U.S. could have trouble competing with the likes of Deutsche Bank and other giants around the world. “If I could cut down the size of every bank in the world, maybe I would do it.” Other case studies Jackson put to the group involved a small city looking for ways to rescue its underfunded pension plan and the risks of an investment banker’s “no-risk” plan to provide funding for the city’s school system, as well as compensation for traders and reasons they are leaving banks for hedge funds. Panelists spoke of the need to restore trust in the banking system. “Eighty-five percent of what’s in Dodd-Frank is good,” said Blythe Masters, global head of commodities and former chief financial officer for the investment bank at J.P. Morgan Chase. “We need to better communicate the good about the role of the financial services sector and banks—that they drive jobs, homes, education, towns, countries,” she said. “Then we have to acknowledge the ugly—the lack of accountability, the extraordinary mistakes that were made, the lack of transparency and the interconnectedness that led to extraordinary fear.” —by Georgette Jasen

Samuel K. Sia, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, has taken his innovative lab-on-a-chip and developed a way to not only check a patient’s HIV status anywhere in the world with just a finger prick, but also synchronize the results automatically and instantaneously with central health-care records—10 times faster, the researchers say, than the benchtop ELISA, a broadly used diagnostic technique. The device (pictured at right) was field-tested in Rwanda by a collaborative team from the Sia lab and ICAP at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health. In the study published online January 18, 2013, in \"Clinical Chemistry,\" and in the print April 2013 issue, Sia describes a major advance towards providing people in remote areas of the world with laboratory-quality diagnostic services traditionally available only in centralized health care settings. “We’ve built a handheld mobile device that can perform laboratory-quality HIV testing, and do it in just 15 minutes and on finger-pricked whole blood,” Sia says. “And, unlike current HIV rapid tests, our device can pick up positive samples normally missed by lateral flow tests, and automatically synchronize the test results with patient health records across the globe using both the cell phone and satellite networks.” Sia collaborated with Claros Diagnostics (a company he co-founded, now called OPKO Diagnostics) to develop a pioneering strategy for an integrated microfluidic-based diagnostic device—the mChip—that can perform complex laboratory assays, and do so with such simplicity that these tests can easily be carried out anywhere, including in resource-limited settings, at a very low cost. This new study builds upon his earlier scientific concepts and incorporates a number of new engineering elements that make the test automated to run with data communication over both cell phone and satellite networks. “There are a set of core functions that such a mobile device has to deliver,” he says. “These include fluid pumping, optical detection, and real-time synchronization of diagnostic results with patient records in the cloud. We’ve been able to engineer all these functions on a handheld mobile device and all powered by a battery.” This new technology, which combines cell phone and satellite communication technologies with fluid miniaturization techniques for performing all essential ELISA functions, could lead to diagnosis and treatment for HIV-infected people who, because they cannot get to centralized health care centers, do not get tested or treated. “This is an important step forward for us towards making a real impact on patients,” says Jessica Justman, MD, senior technical director at ICAP and associate clinical professor of medicine in epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health. “And with the real-time data upload, policymakers and epidemiologists can also monitor disease prevalence across geographical regions more quickly and effectively.” Working with ICAP, OPKO, the Rwandan Ministry of Health, and Rwandan collaborators at Muhima Hospital and two health clinics—Projet San Francisco and Projet Ubuzima, Sia and his team assessed the device's ability to perform HIV testing and then synchronized results in real time with the patients’ electronic health records. They successfully tested over 200 serum, plasma, and whole blood samples, all collected in Rwanda. The mobile device also successfully transmitted all whole-blood test results from a Rwandan clinic to a medical records database stored on the cloud. The device produced results in agreement with a leading ELISA test, including detection of weakly positive samples that were missed by existing rapid tests. The device operated autonomously with minimal user input, produced each result in 15 minutes (compared to 3 hours with the benchtop ELISA), and consumed as little power as a mobile phone. This latest study builds on previous work from the Sia Lab on building a lab-on-a-chip for personal health diagnosis. For this earlier device, Columbia University was named a Medical Devices runner-up in \"The Wall Street Journal’s\" prestigious Technology Innovation Awards in 2011. This research has been funded by a $2-million Saving Lives at Birth transition grant (United States Agency for International Development, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Government of Norway, Grand Challenges Canada, and the World Bank). Sia’s next step will be to implement an antenatal care panel for diagnosing HIV and sexually transmitted diseases for pregnant women in Rwanda. He is also exploring the use of this technology for improving personal health for consumers in the United States. \"The ability to perform state-of-the-art diagnostics on mobile devices has the potential to revolutionize how patients manage their health,” Sia says. “I’m pleased with the progress we have made so far, and we are working hard with our collaborators to bring this technology to clinicians, patients, and consumers.” —by Holly Evarts

When historian Hilary Hallett was researching the cultural history of early Hollywood, she drew on her expertise in feminism and film production to find a defining event about the fledgling industry—the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, a lurid episode involving the death of a beautiful young woman that set off a tabloid frenzy comparable to that surrounding the O.J. Simpson trial. The 1921 incident centered on model and actress Virginia Rappe, who died under mysterious circumstances after attending a hotel room drinking party hosted by Arbuckle, the popular, portly silent film star. He was acquitted after three trials; the first two juries deadlocked. Hallett, an assistant professor in the History Department who also teaches in the American Studies program, found herself focusing on the attention Rappe received. Like thousands of other women during the 1910s, Rappe had journeyed west to find her fortune in the new center of the film industry. Indeed, by 1920 Los Angeles had become the first western boomtown where women outnumbered men. With the publication this month of her first book, \"Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood,\" Hallett has broken new ground on a piece of history that had been largely ignored. “I discovered many promotions encouraging young women like Rappe to go west,” Hallett said. “Movie publicists depicted this new frontier in a classic American way, as a place of opportunity for the young and ambitious. Except in this case, it was female migrants that were especially encouraged.” Hallett, who joined Columbia in 2007 as a post-doctoral fellow after teaching at Rutgers and Johns Hopkins, studied theater and filmmaking at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and later earned her Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her adviser there was the distinguished historian David Nasaw (GSAS ’68, ’72), whose latest book \"The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy,\" has gotten rave reviews. Nasaw praises the original approach she took in her book. “Hilary blasts through the barriers that divide women's history from film, business and social history to tell a remarkable, multilayered story of young women who set out to make their mark—and, against all odds—did just that,” he said. Why had this female migration west been ignored in previous studies of early Hollywood? “Until the current generation most film scholars weren’t much interested in historical work,” said Hallett. “What interest there was tended to focus on figures who had already been canonized, such as D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin.” Yet the success of promotions aimed at women sped what Hallett calls “the feminization of movie fan culture.” Even women who didn’t literally heed the call to “go west” were part of this phenomenon. “In reading fan magazines and going to the movies, it became [women’s] vicarious way of supporting their own emancipation.” Fueling that migration were the industry’s first promoters, among them Louella Parsons, whose own rise from secretary to nationally syndicated columnist was proof that in Hollywood, anything was possible. Parsons trumpeted the accomplishments of these successful women — especially the first motion picture stars—presenting movies as a place where, Hallett said, “brains and beauty could reinvent the terms of feminine success.” Embodying that combination of beauty and brains was silent screen actress Mary Pickford—Hollywood’s first great movie star—who received hundreds of letters daily from female fans. But she was also a producer, writer and co-founder of United Artists, along with Chaplin, Griffith and Douglas Fairbanks. Hallett's book also tackles what she calls the “revolution in morals and manners” after World War I that led to the Hays Code, the first internal censorship guidelines accepted by the film industry. The Arbuckle scandal was one of the forces driving implementation of the new restrictive rules for what could be shown on screen. “Rappe came to stand for all young women who dreamed of heading west to work in the industry,” said Hallett. “[Her death] provided a very public forum to debate Hollywood's role in encouraging these ambitions.” Hallett sees a vastly different cultural landscape in Hollywood today. “The industry has been oriented toward an international audience of teenage boys for about a generation,” said Hallett. “Producers don’t want a lot of dialogue in most movies because then someone has to dub it or translate it. The more special effects, the better. It’s quite sad for those who prefer more dialogue, character-driven stories.” —by Amy Lennard Goehner