Summer Publishing Program
The Summer Publishing Program is CUSJ's summer science-writing program. Over the course of a month, Columbia undergraduates write a scientific review article with mentorship from CUSJ editors, and the finished pieces are published here.
13 pieces
August 18, 2026
What Split-Brain Patients Reveal About the Architecture of Consciousness and the Self
Show a split-brain patient two images at once and one hand reaches for a chicken, the other for a shovel. Both hemispheres are correct, and neither knows what the other saw.
August 18, 2026
A Winning Solution for Vitamin A Deficiency?
Golden rice was engineered in 1999 to carry provitamin A and put its inventor on the cover of TIME. In 2024, a Philippine court ordered its commercial planting stopped.
August 18, 2026
Disrupting Dystrophinopathies: The Road to Answers
Muscular dystrophy affects 1 in 5,000 to 10,000 people, so it rarely gets discussed. A former MDA camp counselor walks through the dystrophinopathies and the therapies now chasing a cure.
August 18, 2026
Running Towards the Sting
People have used bee and wasp venom as medicine since the 19th century. Melittin, most of bee venom's active content, appears to suppress the cytokines that inflame rheumatoid arthritis.
August 18, 2026
Can ARID1A Serve as an Indicator of When Endometriosis Starts to Become Dangerous?
Only half of ovarian cancer patients survive five years. A tumor-suppressor gene called ARID1A may flag which endometriosis lesions are turning malignant, long before a tumor is visible.
August 18, 2026
Where's Waldo(s)?
Fritz Zwicky proposed dark matter in 1933. Nobody has ever detected it, and the newest models suggest the reason is that physicists have been hunting one particle instead of three.
August 18, 2026
I Made the World’s First Exascale Supercomputer Run Faster From My Living Room
Frontier copies GPU data to its CPUs just to add numbers up. An undergraduate on a small allocation made that step run 50 times faster across 8,192 nodes, on her own time.
August 18, 2026
Can Hurting the Body Help the Body?
Botulinum toxin, one of the most lethal substances known, became Botox once someone changed the question. The DLL4-Notch1 pathway heals wounds and feeds tumors; context decides which.
August 18, 2026
The Wrong Question About AI in Education
A Johns Hopkins Socratic tutor built on GPT-4o refused to hand students answers. Only 15% of their messages demanded one anyway, and their exam scores were no better than the control group's.
August 18, 2026
Cell-Cultured Meat: A Sustainable Alternative?
The first lab-grown burger cost $330,000 in 2013. Cultured meat now runs $17 to $20 a pound, uses 99% less land than livestock, and is banned in Florida.
August 18, 2026
How Long Can An Epidemic Last?
37% of Bundibugyo Ebola survivors report symptoms lasting two years or longer. With cases surging in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the illness may outlast the outbreak.
August 18, 2026
Why Is There Still No Perfect Dengue Vaccine?
Dengue had over 14 million reported cases in 2024 and no universal vaccine. Antibodies from one serotype can escort another into your cells, so vaccine design has moved to the molecular level.
August 18, 2026
What Makes Up Your Makeup
Women account for 62% of global skincare spending but only 43% of the cosmetic chemists who formulate the products, and they earn about $2,000 less a year for the same work.
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