A team of researchers from Columbia University Irving Medical Center(CUIMC)and Columbia Engineering has been awarded up to a$38.95 million contract from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health(ARPA-H)to build aliving knee replacement from biomaterials and human stem cells,including apatient’s own cells.ARPA-H is afederal funding agency that funds transformative biomedical and health research breakthroughs,rapidly translating research from the lab to applications in the marketplace.The Award The award,part of the ARPA-H’s Novel Innovations for Tissue Regeneration in Osteoarthritis(NITRO)program,will support the development of NOVAJoint,a revolutionary biocompatible,low-cost,patient-specific knee joint replacement.This high-risk project builds upon more than two decades of collaborative musculoskeletal research at Columbia in engineering and medicine,and promises to offer atransformative solution for the more than thirty million people in the U.S.who suffer from osteoarthritis.NITRO is the first Health Science Futures specific program under the new ARPA-H agency,established by the Biden Administration.The project is led by Clark T.Hung,Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and Professor of Orthopedic Science(in Orthopedic Surgery)at Columbia Engineering,and Nadeen O.Chahine,Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering in the Department of Orthopedic Surgery at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons,leaders in tissue regeneration and orthopedic research. 查看详细>>

Racial discrimination and bias are painful realities and increasingly recognized as detrimental to the health of adults and children.These stressful experiences also appear to be transmitted from mother to child during pregnancy,altering the strength of infants’brain circuits,according to anew study from researchers at Columbia,Yale,and Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.The study found similar brain changes in infants whose mothers experienced stress from adapting to anew culture during pregnancy.“A leading hypothesis would be that the connectivity changes that we see could reduce one’s ability to regulate their emotions and increase risk for mental health disorders,”says the study’s lead author Marisa Spann,PhD,the Herbert Irving Associate Professor of Medical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons.“It remains to be seen if the connectivity differences we found lead to long-term mental health outcomes in children.Our team and others in the field still have the opportunity to test this.”Previous research(link is external and opens in anew window)by Spann and colleagues has documented the impact of various forms of prenatal distress—depression,stress,and anxiety—on the infant brain.“We work with vulnerable and underrepresented populations,and the experience of stigma and discrimination are distressingly common,”Spann says.“This naturally led to discussions about the impact of other stressors,like discrimination and acculturation,on the infant brain.” 查看详细>>

I think that we are far away from understanding the full range of possibilities and risks created by these technological breakthroughs,and this itself is both exciting and disquieting.While there are many ways in which these language models are profoundly valuable tools—in particular,for tasks involving the identification or execution of patterns and rules—they also have intrinsic limitations when it comes to anything requiring genuine understanding or factual accuracy.It is also difficult to predict ex ante or evaluate ex post how exactly the models approach particular questions or the mistakes they might make given the presently opaque nature of their processes,along with the complexity of the activities we might seek to offload upon them.Moreover,our existing legal institutions are ill-equipped for regulating these systems,as they were designed for the linear and comparatively transparent actions and activities of persons.It is thus important that we neither over-or underestimate the potential of these models—nor the challenges that they will raise for us—and proceed very carefully in thinking about how best to integrate AI into our world and lives,notwithstanding the present flurry of reactions and rhetoric in the public sphere.I‘m very excited about the emerging capabilities of generative AI.Finally,a machine that can take in simple instructions and produce abasic output.“Basic”might sound derogatory,but basic can be very useful—writing email text based on bullet points,summarizing areport into atweet,extracting all the names of people from awebpage,etc.These are annoying tasks that take people time,but don‘t really need our creativity or specialized cognitive skills.More than just awriting aid,generative AI can also be athinking aid.It can help with generating ideas,and you can either find agood one,or see away to easily improve one.It can help get out afirst draft—or even better suggest multiple first drafts for you to pick from.Then you can tell it which parts to improve and how to improve them.Generative AI isn‘t quite good enough to do atask to completion all on its own,but it‘s agreat collaborator to get you started.I‘m certainly excited.Think of aphysical robot operating in the real world:it needs both abstract,semantic intelligence(to understand conceptually how the world works)and embodied intelligence,or the skill to physically interact with the world.We are constantly making progress on the latter,but on the former we have had relatively little progress over the years.Large language models like ChatGPT just might bring exactly that to the table.A physically skilled robot can then take such models out of the purely virtual world of the Internet,and put them to good use on real-world physical tasks. 查看详细>>

New research by Columbia University astrophysicists Luca Comisso and Lorenzo Sironi shows how and when these particles form and offers clues to questions that have troubled scientists since the 1940s.For decades,scientists have been trying to solve avexing problem about the weather in outer space:At unpredictable times,high-energy particles bombard the earth and objects outside the earth’s atmosphere with radiation that can endanger the lives of astronauts and destroy satellites’electronic equipment.These flare-ups can even trigger showers of radiation strong enough to reach passengers in airplanes flying over the North Pole.Despite scientists’best efforts,a clear pattern of how and when flare-ups will occur has remained enduringly difficult to identify.This week,in apaper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters,authors Luca Comisso and Lorenzo Sironi of Columbia’s Department of Astronomy and the Astrophysics Laboratory,have for the first time used supercomputers to simulate when and how high-energy particles are born in turbulent environments like that on the atmosphere of the sun.This new research paves the way for more accurate predictions of when dangerous bursts of these particles will occur.“This exciting new research will allow us to better predict the origin of solar energetic particles and improve forecasting models of space weather events,a key goal of NASA and other space agencies and governments around the globe,”Comisso said.Within the next couple of years,he added,NASA‘s Parker Solar Probe,the closest spacecraft to the sun,may be able to validate the paper’s findings by directly observing the predicted distibution of high-energy particles that are generated in the sun‘s outer atmosphere.In their paper,“Ion and Electron Acceleration in Fully Kinetic Plasma Turbulence,”Comisso and Sironi demonstrate that magnetic fields in the outer atmosphere of the sun can accelerate ions and electrons up to velocities close to the speed of light.The sun and other stars’outer atmosphere consist of particles in aplasma state,a highly turbulent state distinct from liquid,gas,and solid states.Scientists have long believed that the sun’s plasma generates high-energy particles.But particles in plasma move so erratically and unpredictably that they have until now not been able to fully demonstrate how and when this occurs.Using supercomputers at Columbia,NASA,and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center,Comisso and Sironi created computer simulations that show the exact movements of electrons and ions in the sun’s plasma.These simulations mimic the atmospheric conditions on the sun,and provide the most extensive data gathered to-date on how and when high-energy particles will form.The research provides answers to questions that scientists have been investigating for at least 70 years:In 1949,the physicist Enrico Fermi began to investigate magnetic fields in outer space as apotential source of the high-energy particles(which he called cosmic rays)that were observed entering the earth’s atmosphere.Since then,scientists have suspected that the sun’s plasma is amajor source of these particles,but definitively proving it has been difficult. 查看详细>>

Columbia Psychiatry among principal investigators in biotech Compass Pathways study of more than 200 patients In agroundbreaking study,a single dose of psilocybin,combined with psychological support,generated arapid response and significant reduction in depressive symptoms that lasted up to 12 weeks.Compass Pathways,announced that COMP360—a psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms—had succeeded as promising for treatment-resistant depression in aphase 2clinical trial.The London-based biotech company partnered on the study with multiple sites,including Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute.“We now have evidence from alarge,well-designed trial that psilocybin may be effective for people with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder,a common and devastating condition,”said David J.Hellerstein,MD,professor of clinical psychiatry and principal investigator on the Columbia trial.“These findings suggest that COMP360 psilocybin therapy could play amajor role in psychiatric care,if approved.”The study,which has not yet been published in apeer-reviewed journal,is the largest to date using psilocybin to treat depression in people who aren’t helped by existing therapies.An estimated third of severely depressed patients suffer with treatment-resistant depression.To conduct the research,investigators randomized 233 patients to receive asingle dose of one of three doses of COMP360—25 mg,10 mg,and 1mg,a dose that was essentially aplacebo—in conjunction with support from therapists trained to guide people through psychedelic-assisted treatments.All participants were taken off antidepressants before the study.The study(link is external and opens in anew window)found that participants administered the highest dose of psilocybin had the steepest decline in depressive symptoms.They reported arapid remission at three weeks that was sustained at the three-month mark.In addition to showing the efficacy of the higher dose,the study showed that the lower dose(10 mg)dose was not effective.Twenty-four participants withdrew from the trial and some experienced adverse effects.Compass reported that 90 percent of those effects were mild to moderate,most commonly headache,nausea,fatigue,and insomnia.Twelve patients reported severe effects,such suicidal behavior ideation,more common among those with treatment-resistant depression.Hellerstein said that the study significantly refines our understanding of the required active dose of psilocybin when treating depression,which is an essential step toward reaching the next research phrase.“This is the first psychedelic study to rigorously evaluate rates of adverse events and serious adverse events,which are of utmost concern when using this powerful class of drugs among patients with severe disorders,”Dr.Hellerstein said.“Understanding these risks is essential to move toward FDA approval and can allow clinicians to develop strategies to manage risks in order to optimize outcomes.”The company is working toward starting aphase 3trial of COMP360 in mid-2022. 查看详细>>

A series of interactive workshops developed by Columbia physicist Sebastian Will and STEMteachersNYC will give educators tips and tools to cover quantum science in their classrooms.If you imagine alaser,you might think of beams of light popping balloons or slicing through ametal slab like butter.Lasers can indeed heat things up,but they can also cool things down.These days,physicists use laser cooling to understand the fundamentals of quantum physics,with implications for building things like super-precise atomic clocks and super-fast quantum computers.To study the quantum properties of atoms—how they behave when classical,temperature-based influences are stripped away—you need to chill them to as close to absolute zero as you can.This is where the lasers come in.As Claire Warner,a graduate student in Sebastian Will’s lab at Columbia,recently explained to agroup of teachers from across the United States,photons,the energy packets that make up light,have momentum when fired from alaser.When those photons hit an atom,that atom gets a"momentum kick"that slows it down.In just three milliseconds,atoms can be super-cooled to just above absolute zero,-459.67°F.Quantum physics then takes over,and it’s off to the experimental races.“Laser Cooling:Quantum Physics Applications for High School Students,”is the most recent workshop in aseries that Will’s lab is developing with the nonprofit STEMteachersNYC.Funded by Will’s National Science Foundation CAREER award,the Quantum Physics Outreach Program(QPOP)is giving high school teachers the tools to share quantum physics with their students."It‘s providing teachers with simple concepts that allow them to make aconnection to modern quantum technology,”Will said.In collaboration with Fernand Brunschwig at STEMteachersNYC,Will and his graduate students distill their work in experimental physics to afew simple ideas that the teachers attending the workshops can understand.The training has amultiplier effect for reaching new audiences:if 50 teachers who attend aworkshop go on to teach these concepts to 30 students at atime,that’s now 1,500 students with new quantum knowledge,Will said.Often,high school students have already covered the basics—atomic energy levels,force and momentum,waves and the Doppler effect,and so on—just not necessarily in the context of quantum physics.Once equipped,teachers can take their students from performing calculations with hypothetical cannonballs to calculations about laser cooling,a real-world physics application.“The conceptual leaps that need to be made aren’t that big,”Warner said.Warner is now an expert on laser cooling,but wasn’t always.Popular science tends to focus on outer space or black holes,and although the basics of quantum physics have been around for nearly acentury,most high school classrooms still focus on classical Newtonian physics.“There aren’t PBS specials on quantum physics and its modern applications,”she said.She learned about ultracold atoms in aphysics lab as an undergraduate;she hopes the workshops might introduce students to quantum science even earlier in their academic careers.Developing the workshops has been challenging,said Warner.In speaking to other researchers,a few technical words can convey what you mean.That’s not the case when translating to aroom of high school teachers.“You can’t use jargon or acronyms,”she said.“You really have to go back to basics."Will said that he and his students,with STEMteachersNYC,are continuously improving the workshops as they move forward. 查看详细>>

If you’ve ever called on Siri or Alexa for help,or generated aself-portrait in the style of aRenaissance painter,you have interacted with deep learning,a form of artificial intelligence that extracts patterns from mountains of data to make predictions.Though deep learning and AI have become household terms,the breakthroughs in statistics that have fueled this revolution are less known.In arecent paper,Andrew Gelman,a statistics professor at Columbia,and Aki Vehtari,a computer science professor at Finland’s Aalto University,published alist of the most important statistical ideas in the last 50 years.Below,Gelman and Vehtari break down the list for those who may have snoozed through Statistics 101.Each idea can be viewed as astand-in for an entire subfield,they say,with afew caveats:science is incremental;by singling out these works,they do not mean to diminish the importance of similar,related work.They have also chosen to focus on methods in statistics and machine learning,rather than equally important breakthroughs in statistical computing,and computer science and engineering,which have provided the tools and computing power for data analysis and visualization to become everyday practical tools.Finally,they have focused on methods,while recognizing that developments in theory and methods are often motivated by specific applications.See something important that’s missing?Tweet it at columbiascience and Gelman and Vehtari will consider adding it to the list.The 10 articles and books below all were published in the last 50 years and are listed in chronological order.1.Hirotugu Akaike(1973).Information Theory and an Extension of the Maximum Likelihood Principle.Proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Information Theory.This is the paper that introduced the term AIC(originally called An Information Criterion but now known as Akaike Information Criterion),for evaluating amodel’s fit based on its estimated predictive accuracy.AIC was instantly recognized as auseful tool,and this paper was one of several published in the mid-1970s placing statistical inference within apredictive framework.We now recognize predictive validation as afundamental principle in statistics and machine learning.Akaike was an applied statistician,who in the 1960s,tried to measure the roughness of airport runways,in the same way that Benoit Mandelbrot‘s early papers on taxonomy and Pareto distributions led to his later work on the mathematics of fractals. 查看详细>>

Critical race theory is making national news headlines,and three pioneers of this academic discipline are Columbia Law professors KimberléCrenshaw,Kendall Thomas,and Patricia Williams.Republican lawmakers in more than 20 states have introduced or passed legislation that would directly target the principles underlying critical race theory by banning schools from teaching about structural racism.These efforts to demonize critical race theory are gaining traction more than ayear into anational reckoning with racism,following the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor,and the ensuing protests.Speaking at aconference held by the Faith and Freedom Coalition on June 18,former Vice President Mike Pence said that“critical race theory is racism.”Senator Ted Cruz,at the same gathering,compared the theory to the Ku Klux Klan saying the curriculum is“every bit as racist”as the white supremacist hate group.“Critical race theory,”the senator said,“says every white person is aracist.”These campaigns are not just based on ignorance of how critical race theory developed and is now applied,but also represent an attempt to stoke areactionary resistance,rather than abroader understanding.Urgent and Necessary Work“Critical race theory and the essential scholarship it has advanced may challenge many long-held views,but that is what makes this work so urgent and necessary,”said Columbia President Lee C.Bollinger(LAW’71).“I could not be more proud that it is taking place at Columbia.This is,after all,what makes universities such vital institutions in society.”“In the finest tradition of Columbia Law School,our brilliant faculty were among the foundational thinkers and continue to lead the dialogue on this vital issue,”said Gillian Lester,Dean and Lucy G.Moses Professor of Law.“Their scholarship,teaching,and advocacy have illuminated the pervasive effects of structural racism in our society and in the law.That they have persisted in the face of hostility and outright falsehoods is testament to their vision and determination."Critical race theory was amovement that initially started at Harvard under Professor Derrick Bell in the 1980s.It evolved in reaction to critical legal studies,which came about in the 70s and dissected the idea that law was just and neutral.Over time,the movement grew among legal scholars,mostly of color,at law schools across the country,including at UCLA,where Crenshaw lectured on critical race theory,civil rights,and constitutional law,and later at Columbia,where she was appointed afull professor in 1995,alongside Williams,a former student,research assistant,and lifelong mentee of Bell’s,and who is now professor of law emerita. 查看详细>>

Researchers have found that inhibiting an enzyme in the liver significantly reduces triglyceride levels in mice.A team at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York studied how to lower the triglyceride fats that cells use as fuel.Their findinga were published Thursday in the journal Cell Metabolism.The fats are transported to cells through the bloodstream.When triglyceride levels are high,the particles are forced into cells lining the arteries.These cholesterol-laden plaques lead to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.Normal triglycerides are less than 150 milligrams per deciliter based on ablood test and the most effective treatment is weight loss with healthier eating habits and regular exercise,according to the Mayo Clinic.Drugs with statins are not effective in lowering triglyceride levels as they are with cholesterol.Previously,Utpal Pajvan,an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons,led ateam that found that inhibiting the enzyme with certain drugs improves blood sugar levels and insulin sensitivity,and reduces fat accumulation and inflammation in the liver.In new study,led by KyeongJin Kim,an associate research scientist at the school,found that inhibiting the enzyme also causes liver cells to pull triglycerides out of the bloodstream."We see this data as proof of principle that adrug that inhibits gamma secretase could be used to produce multiple benefits at once,"Pajvan said in anews release."This approach would be especially beneficial for people with type 2diabetes,who have insulin resistance and high blood sugars but often also have high levels of plasma triglycerides and fatty liver disease."Drugs that inhibit gamma secretase don‘t work to treat chronic diseases because they block the enzyme throughout the body and cause severe gastrointestinal side effects.So,the researchers worked with industry colleagues to develop an"antisense"molecule that preferentially blocks gamma secretase in the liver.That molecule reduced triglycerides and glucose in the blood without apparent side effects in mice.Pajvan expects it to take several years before the compound or asimilar drug can be tested on humans."Many people are looking at new ways to reduce triglycerides and the more possibilities we identify,the greater chance we have of ultimately succeeding,"Pajvani said. 查看详细>>

Gardeners and nature lovers have noticed that plants are flowering earlier every year—a phenomenon generally attributed to climate change.New findings by Columbia researchers,however,are among the first to show that adecline in biodiversity may also play arole,magnifying the impact of climate change not just when plants flower,but on entire ecosystems.“Biodiversity is an important component of all ecosystems,”said Amelia Wolf,a research scientist in Columbia’s Ecology,Evolution and Environmental Biology(E3B)department.“Plant and animal species are dependent on each other,and changes in biodiversity could have important consequences for the sustainability and functioning of ecosystems worldwide.”Plants,for instance,flower for the sole purpose of reproducing—creating seeds to grow the next generation—and many plants rely on pollinators such as insects or birds to help with that process,Wolf explained.“If aplant flowers before its pollinators are active,the plant species can’t reproduce or may produce fewer seeds,”she said.Insects,birds,humans or other animals that depend on those plant species for food and habitat could then also be affected,Wolf added.The timing of plant flowering is known to be influenced by nonliving aspects of an ecosystem,such as rising temperatures,and is widely regarded as a“fingerprint”of climate change.A warmer atmosphere affects soil temperature and water content.These variables,along with other parts of an ecosystem,trigger plants to mature and produce flowers—a critical stage in their reproductive cycle.While numerous studies have found that such nonliving aspects influence the timing of biological events in plants,Wolf’s study is among the first to investigate the impact of plant-to-plant interactions.Wolf and her two co-researchers,from the University of California,Santa Cruz and the United States Geological Survey Western Geographic Science Center,set out to see if adecline in biodiversity had any effect on phenology,or the study of how the biological world times natural events.They wanted to see if the loss of plant species would affect the timing of events such as flowering for neighboring species of plants.In 2007,the team set up an experimental field containing 16 different plant species in aCalifornia grassland.They created plots with varying numbers of species to see what effect diversity loss would have on the remaining plants,an experiment intended to mimic human impact on plant communities worldwide.Habitat destruction,invasive species,pollution,human overpopulation,over-harvesting,wildlife trade and general human consumption are major contributors to the enormous biodiversity loss that has earth scientists and experts gravely concerned,Wolf noted.As the researchers reduced plant diversity,they observed warmer ground temperatures and changes in the soil and flowering timing similar in magnitude to the impact of global warming alone.For each species that was removed,the remaining plants flowered,on average,about ahalf day earlier than they would in plots with the greatest diversity.The removal of two species resulted,on average,in plants flowering afull day earlier than they would otherwise,and so on.“This is not just about when tulips will reach full bloom,”Wolf said.“Biodiversity loss and the impact it has on plant phenology can impact an entire ecosystem.Plants and the communities in which they grow are interconnected and critically dependent on each other.” 查看详细>>