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It’s relatively simple to build a device capable of detecting wireless signals if you don’t mind making one that consumes lots of power. It’s not so easy to design energy-efficient devices that function as well as the components they replace, or to do it at the nano scale. 

“The development of this new technology over the past decade has brought us to the edge of fantastic new discoveries,” said Michael Purdy, the University’s executive vice president of research. “This is revolutionary. That means that Columbia has to be at the lead, just as we have been in nuclear physics and as we are in climate change.” 

In graduate school Sahin created an atomic force microscope that could measure mechanical forces at the molecular level, winning the grand prize in the National Inventors Hall of Fame’s Collegiate Inventors Competition. Today a refined version of the microscope is Sahin’s primary research tool.

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…

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…

President Barack Obama (CC'83), the first Columbia graduate to be elected president of the United States, was sworn in for a second term.

In the hippocampus, the dentate gyrus—which uses pattern separation to form new memories—is one of two areas of the brain where neurogenesis takes place.

Robert J. Winchester, MD, an immunologist in the Department of Medicine’s Division of Rheumatology, was awarded the 2013 Crafoord Prize in Polyarthritis by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Columbia University will award George Manahan, Music Director of American Composers Orchestra, the 2012 Ditson Conductor’s Award for the advancement of American music.

Computer Science Assistant Professor Martha Kim has won a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to develop energy tracking and monitoring techniques to audit and control software energy consumption.

An American atmospheric chemist who led efforts to identify the cause of the Antarctic ozone hole and a French geochemist who extracted the longest-yet climate record from polar ice cores have won the prestigious 2012 Vetlesen Prize. Susan Solomon and Jean Jouzel will share the $250,000 award, considered to be the earth sciences’ equivalent of a Nobel.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially designated 2012 as the warmest year on record for the contiguous United States. This isn't too surprising for a year that already had the warmest spring, the second warmest summer and fourth warmest winter. The average temperature for 2012 was 55.3°F, 3.2°F above the 20th century average, and a full 1.0°F above 1998, the previous record holder. Climate expert Anthony Barnston, who is the Chief Forecaster at Columbia's International Research Institute for Climate and Society, explains some of the climate factors behind this record-breaking…

Most cosmologists agree that the universe started out hot, dense and microscopically small. But where did it come from, and how did it expand into its present form?

(Editor's note: Physics Professor Amber Miller, who also serves as Columbia’s Dean of Science in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, leads the team based at the University’s Nevis Lab that developed and built key components of the EBEX telescope that launched from Antarctica on Dec. 29, 2012 and remained aloft for three weeks to collect data. This story about the project that will provide new insights into the big bang theory and how the universe expanded was originally published on April 7, 2009.) Most cosmologists agree that the universe started out hot, dense and microscopically small. But…

Findings suggest that therapies that increase leptin-signaling may relieve asthma in obese people