News

Fourteen years ago, North Korea’s calendar was changed so that time officially began in 1912—the birth year of Kim Il Sung, who ruled the communist nation from its founding in 1948.

Without real estate, there could be no architecture, no planning, no preservation. Now the graduate school devoted to all those things has launched the University’s first Center for Urban Real Estate, a research group whose mission is to identify solutions for a rapidly urbanizing world.

Ruben Gonzalez views ribosomes—the minute particles in cells that make proteins—as the “machines” of life. Naturally, the associate professor of chemistry is interested in watching these little protein-producing factories in real time, especially when they malfunction and cause disease.

Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University’s School of Engineering today announced a $30 million gift from longtime Cosmopolitan magazine editor and author Helen Gurley Brown to establish the David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

Last fall, a private bus company operating under a city contract permitted its passengers, primarily Orthodox Jews, to enforce a religious tradition—in order to prevent physical contact between the sexes, women were required to sit in the back of the bus. The New York Times, New York Post and CBS 2 ran the story, which was later picked up by the BBC and Belgian and Israeli news outlets. But it was an enterprising reporter from The New York World—a new Graduate School of Journalism endeavor—who first broke this story of segregation.

Sasha Chavkin (JRN’10),…

A Volcanic Explosion Crater May Have Future Potential

In California’s Death Valley, death is looking just a bit closer. Geologists have determined that the half-mile-wide Ubehebe Crater, formed by a prehistoric volcanic explosion, was created far more recently than previously thought—and that conditions for a sequel may exist today.

Poet, painter and photographer Liu Xia has been a noteworthy figure on the contemporary Chinese art scene for more than three decades.

If Barry Kane does his job right, you may never know he exists. As associate vice president and University Registrar for all 17 of Columbia’s divisions, he oversees the invisible but vital tasks of academic life: class registration and course enrollment, classroom assignments, final exam schedules, transcripts for tens of thousands of students, and mandatory reports to the federal government and NCAA. And, of course, the 10,000-plus diplomas conferred each year.

Worldwide pandemics of influenza caused widespread death and illness in 1918, 1957, 1968, and 2009. A new study examining weather patterns around the time of these pandemics finds that each of them was preceded by La Niña conditions in the equatorial Pacific.

Study Reveals Origins of Esophageal Cancer |  New Understanding of Fastest-Rising Solid Tumor in U.S.

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) have identified the critical early cellular and molecular events that give rise to a type of esophageal cancer called esophageal adenocarcinoma, the fastest-rising solid tumor in the United States. The findings, published online today inCancer Cell (21(1) 36–51 (2012), challenge conventional wisdom regarding the origin and development of this deadly cancer and its precursor lesion, Barrett’s esophagus, and…

Columbia University will be closed on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Jan. 16, and will reopen on Tuesday, Jan. 17.

Reducing Soot and Methane Would Bring Fast Results, Says Study

A study by a large international team of scientists says that relatively cheap, simple measures to cut two common pollutants could substantially reduce global warming and improve human health and agriculture in coming decades.

Nathaniel Persily, Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science at Columbia Law School, has been named special master for redistricting by the Connecticut State Supreme Court.

President Lee C. Bollinger’s Statement on the Recent Death of Judge Robert L. Carter

A review of recent research on methamphetamine use suggests that claims the drug causes significant cognitive problems are exaggerated. The study by Carl Hart, PhD, and colleagues at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) was released in this month’s Neuropsychopharmacology.