Temperatures rising above freezing in the Arctic is a crucial threshold. “That’s the point where everything changes,” said Marco Tedesco, a geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “This is extremely exceptional.”

Columbia University astronomer Kathryn Johnston co-authored the study and told WNYC that if the stars had come from outside the Milky Way, they would have been made up of different combinations of elements.

"Disruption to the information systems on which banks rely could have shockwaves throughout the financial system, undermining public confidence in banking or knocking off line the ability to engage in commercial transactions," said Matthew Waxman, co-chair of the Cybersecurity Center at the Columbia Data Science Institute.

Simon Mason, a climate scientist at Columbia University’s International Research Institute for Climate and Society, discusses the importance of improving longer-term climate forecasting for adapting to climate change.

New claims that increased snowfall in eastern regions could offset melting in the western side of the continent might not stand the test of time, says Indrani Das, a geophysicist at Columbia University’s Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory.

A new debugging tool developed by Junfeng Yang, a computer scientist at Columbia University, and his colleagues finds and fixes the errors that cause neural networks to make mistakes.

Andrew Juhl of Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory co-authored a study that measured trace pharmaceuticals in the Hudson River and found fish and other forms of aquatic life may be experiencing harm from the contaminants, which are more widespread than previously believed.