While scientists have made educated guesses about how the Martian interior looks, they still don't know for sure what they'll find, said Columbia's Sean Solomon, who was the principal investigator for NASA's 2011 MESSENGER mission to Mercury.

Yaniv Erlich, a geneticist at Columbia University, cautioned in a June 2014 article about genetic privacy that GEDmatch, the website that was reportedly used to catch California’s Golden State Killer, could allow for such “genealogical triangulation.”

Peter B. Kelemen, a Columbia geologist, has been studying how a natural process, called carbon mineralization, might be harnessed, accelerated and applied inexpensively on a huge scale — admittedly some very big “ifs” — to help fight climate change.

Research led by Columbia climate scientist Richard Seager found the stark climatic border in the U.S. separating the sultry east from the dry west is rapidly shifting—a change that could have a significant future impact.

With the help of artificial intelligence, Columbia astronomers now have a better method for determining the long-term habitability of exoplanets orbiting more than one star.

Eric Kandel and Daphna Shohamy, neuroscientists at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, are investigating whether abstract art elicits increased activity in the hippocampus, allowing us to focus inward and access our most personal thoughts and feelings.

The Racing Auditory Display is a new invention that helps those who are blind play video games. Brian A. Smith, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Columbia Engineering who created the system, discusses how it works.