The coordination of neural activity across widespread brain networks is essential for human cognition. Researchers have long assumed that oscillations in the brain, commonly measured for research purposes, brain-computer interfacing, and clinical tests, were stationary signals that occurred independently at separate brain regions.

Blind people and others with serious visual impairments are not known for playing a lot of video games. Yet, a graduate student at Columbia University has developed a system that allows completely blind people to drive racing cars in video games.

As electronic devices and circuits shrink into the nanoscale, the ability to transfer data on a chip, at low power with little energy loss, is becoming a critical challenge. Over the past decade, squeezing light into tiny devices and circuits has been a major goal of nanophotonics researchers. Electronic oscillations at the surface of metals, known as surface plasmon polaritons or plasmons for short, have become an intense area of focus.

  Research shows that older adults can still grow new brain cells. It has become conventional wisdom that older adults’ brains can’t crank out as many new cells as younger ones do. Mental decline was all but certain as people aged. Getting older? Some good news, apparently the brain never stops growing!

Spine deformities, such as idiopathic scoliosis and kyphosis (also known as 'hunchback'), are characterised by an abnormal curvature in the spine. The children with these spinal deformities are typically advised to wear a brace that fits around the torso and hips to correct the abnormal curve. Bracing has been shown to prevent progression of the abnormal curve and avoid surgery. The underlying technology for bracing has not fundamentally changed ...

Growing human cardiac tissue that behaves like native heart muscle would be transformative for biomedical research, enabling researchers to study human physiology and model heart diseases under fully controlled conditions. While today scientists can grow many tissues, including the heart muscle, from stem cells taken from a small blood sample of any of us, current bioengineered tissues fail to show some of the most critical hallmarks of adult hum...

Researchers have devised a medicated skin patch that can turn energy-storing white fat into energy-burning brown fat locally while raising the body’s overall metabolism. The patch could be used to burn off pockets of unwanted fat such as “love handles” and treat metabolic disorders, such as obesity and diabetes, according to researchers at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and the University of North Carolina.

Researchers at Columbia University are working on substantially improving the abilities of brain-computer interfaces by creating a high density electrode array that can stimulate and read the brain at high precision. The research is part of DARPA’s Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) project that is working on all the different pieces necessary to build a truly advanced brain-computer systems.

Columbia University researchers have developed a tool that is likely to revolutionise the way we detect and treat pathogens in everything from human health to agriculture to water. Using only common household baker’s yeast, they’ve created an extremely low-cost, low-maintenance, on-site dipstick test they hope will aid in the surveillance and early detection of fungal pathogens responsible for major human disease, agricultural damage ...

Humanity may soon generate more data than hard drives or magnetic tape can handle, a problem that has scientists turning to nature's age-old solution for information-storage - DNA. In a study in Science, a pair of researchers at Columbia University and the New York Genome Center (NYGC) show that an algorithm designed for streaming video on a cellphone can unlock DNA's nearly full storage potential by squeezing more information into its ...

A team of researchers led by Biomedical Engineering Professor Sam Sia at Columbia Engineering has developed a way to manufacture microscale-sized machines from biomaterials that can safely be implanted in the body. Working with hydrogels, which are biocompatible materials that engineers have been studying for decades, Sia has invented a new technique that stacks the soft material in layers to make devices that have three-dimensional, freely movin...

In a discovery that could have profound implications for future energy policy, Columbia scientists have demonstrated it is possible to manufacture solar cells that are far more efficient than existing silicon energy cells by using a new kind of material, a development that could help reduce fossil fuel consumption. The team, led by Xiaoyang Zhu, a professor of Chemistry at Columbia University, focused its efforts on a new class of solar...

Researchers have engineered living bone tissue to repair bone loss in the jaw, a structure that is typically difficult to restore. The team led by researchers from Columbia University, New York, grafted customised implants into pig jaws that resulted in integration and function of the engineered graft into the recipient's own tissue. The work, reported in Science Translational Medicine, suggests that personalised bone grafts for facial ...

If Mechanical Engineering Professor Hod Lipson has his way, we may soon have a 3D food printer that could revolutionise the way we think about food and prepare it. Over the past year, Lipson and his students have been developing a 3D food printer that can fabricate edible items through computer-guided software and the actual cooking of edible pastes, gels, powders, and liquid ingredients - all in a prototype that looks like an elegant coffee mach...

Columbia Engineering researchers, working with colleagues at Disney Research and MIT, have developed a method to control sound waves, using a computational approach to inversely design acoustic filters that can fit within an arbitrary 3D shape while achieving target sound filtering properties. Led by Computer Science Professor Changxi Zheng, the team designed acoustic voxels, small, hollow, cube-shaped chambers through which sound enters and exit...

  A technique developed by Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, the Mikati Foundation Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia Engineering and professor of medical sciences (in Medicine) at Columbia University, repairs large bone defects in the head and face by using lab-grown living bone, tailored to the patient and the defect being treated.

By 2050, the world will need to produce 70% more food than we did in 2007 to feed a global population expected to reach 9.6 billion, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Increased food production means a greater demand for energy. But many farmers in developing countries do not have access to clean and affordable modern energy. Moreover, they are often unaware of what technology might enable them to farm more ef...

Last year, Columbia Engineering researchers were the first to invent a technology—full-duplex radio ICs—that can be implemented in nanoscale CMOS to enable simultaneous transmission and reception at the same frequency in a wireless radio. That system required two antennas, one for the transmitter and one for the receiver. Now, the team, led by Electrical Engineering Associate Professor Harish Krishnaswamy, has developed a technology t...

A team led by Shree K. Nayar, T.C. Chang Professor of Computer Science at Columbia Engineering, has developed a novel sheet camera that can be wrapped around everyday objects to capture images that cannot be taken with one or more conventional cameras. The Columbia team, which includes research engineer Daniel Sims BS'14 and postdoctoral researcher Yonghao Yue, designed and fabricated a flexible lens array that adapts its optical properties when ...

Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) and University of Iowa scientists have used a new gene-editing technology called CRISPR to repair a genetic mutation responsible for retinitis pigmentosa (RP), an inherited condition that causes the retina to degrade and leads to blindness in at least 1.5m cases worldwide.