So-called “white lies” – telling a spouse you like their sub-par cooking, or praising a friend’s unflattering haircut – serve a purpose. But they can cause problems in the workplace, where honest feedback, even when it’s negative, is important.
After examining a dozen types of suns and a roster of planet surfaces, Cornell astronomers have developed a practical model – an environmental color “decoder” – to tease out climate clues for potentially habitable exoplanets in galaxies far away.
The COVID-19 pandemic is keeping people apart, but Cornell students showed that despite physical distancing they can still make meaningful local, regional and global connections.
Amnon Ortoll-Bloch is a doctoral candidate in chemistry and chemical biology from Colima City, Colima, Mexico. After earning his bachelor’s degree at National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City, Mexico, he chose to pursue further study at Cornell due to its faculty, research opportunities, and collaborative and supportive nature.
What is your area of research and why is it important?
Spring 2020 was a semester like no other. Over the course of a few weeks, thousands of classes – lectures and seminars, laboratory and performance courses, capstone projects and veterinary clinics – transitioned entirely online. Instructors navigated technical and logistical difficulties, as well as the shifting realities of a global pandemic. But amid the challenges, students and faculty found opportunities for innovation, connection and intellectual growth.
The Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) will partially restart operations in June to conduct research related to treatment of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
While they’d all rather be on campus with their friends celebrating the last days of the semester, students have found fun and challenging ways to make the best of their situation of remote learning.
Historian Barry Strauss, who specializes in ancient and military history, notes that plagues and epidemics have often been linked to wars. The current pandemic will accelerate the use of computer models and big data in the field of history; however, he says, COVID-19 has taught us that models are only as good as the assumptions on which they’re based.
This summer, the Cornell in Washington program is offering undergraduates a chance to study COVID-19’s effects on the economy, politics and social policy through the eyes of politicians and policymakers working directly on the crisis response.
Sophomores in the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity were supposed to be spending the summer of 2020 living in the House on Roosevelt Island in New York City and taking a special set of classes at Cornell Tech.
In this time of increasing political polarization, the participation of scientists in political advocacy has become yet another flashpoint, with some critics accusing scientists of being self-serving if they advocate for increased science funding.
The proliferation of medical misinformation on social media and the human experience of social distancing are among the pandemic-related topics to be studied with Rapid Response Fund grants from the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.
Destiny Malloy ’21 had a sweet internship lined up this summer near New York City, working in data analytics at L’Oreal. After COVID-19, it was converted to unpaid and remote.
Adam Spaulding-Astudillo ’20 was in interviews for a job using his degree in ecology and evolutionary biology, but companies stopped hiring.
Witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust and other acts of genocide are dwindling in numbers, but their faces and voices will live on through Cornell University Library’s recently acquired permanent access to USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive (VHA).
Cornell thought leaders discussed the balance between public health and economic health, and the role government plays in finding a path forward during this worldwide crisis.
In this great big universe we call home, we are dependent on each other to get through this crisis, writes Ray Jayawardhana, Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and professor of astronomy, in an op-ed article in USA Today.
As a college senior stuck home during quarantine with an interest in infectious diseases and past experience with the World Health Organization (WHO), Dalton Price ’20 thought it was completely obvious that he would sign up to help in any way he could during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Before the Ithaca campus closed in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, members of Cornell’s Asian American community enjoyed strong connections to each other.
Beloved emeritus professor and scholar David Bathrick, who taught theater arts, German studies and Jewish studies at Cornell for 20 years, died April 30 at his home in Bremen, Germany. He was 84.
Raven Schwam-Curtis ’20 had seen the coronavirus coming: She visited China and South Korea on a research trip over winter break, when the first cases were being reported there.
But she was still confronted with financial and emotional disruption when the pandemic forced Cornell to abruptly suspend classes in mid-March and switch to remote learning April 6, following spring break.
In February, Longsha Liu ’21 was well aware that COVID-19 was coursing through China and around the world.
His mother had been giving him regular updates about the virus’s spread in China, where most of his immediate family live – including his 77-year old grandmother, who continued to practice as a physician.
Christine “Xine” Yao, M.A. '13, Ph.D. '16, was named one of the 2020 BBC Radio 3/AHRC New Generation Thinkers. The program, now in its 10th year, affords early career academics a platform to share their ideas via BBC Radio 3 and other outlets.
“It is an amazing opportunity to work with the BBC to share my expertise and hopefully provoke different ways of understanding the world,” Yao said.
The COVID-19 virus arrived in Latin America later than Europe and the United States, but it is currently spreading across the region, with peaks expected to come later in May. Brazil, the continent’s most populous country, has the largest numbers of cases so far. This week, the country’s Senate is expected to vote on an economic package for states and cities to compensate for economic losses.
In an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle, Vivian Zayas, professor of psychology, says the effects of the coronavirus pandemic will be imprinted on the personality of the United States for a long time.
Festival 24, the semiannual student-run theater festival from the Cornell University Department of Performing and Media Arts, is launching online under a new title, Festival 24.0. The Festival, which is normally held at the beginning of each semester, will happen on Saturday, May 9, at 8:00 p.m. EST via Zoom to provide a performance opportunity for students while in-person theater events are suspended.
In his poetry, fiction and essays, and Mukoma Wa Ngugi, associate professor of English, asks why tensions endure between Africans and African Americans despite a history of common political struggle. In this Cornell Research article, he talks about his first encounters with what it meant to be Black in the United States——in his father’s library in Kenya, reading James Baldwin and Richard Wright and issues of Ebony and Jet.
The monumental scroll stretches nearly 60 yards around the Bartels Gallery in the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art – an immersive calligraphy experience by Tong Yang-Tze, one of Taiwan’s foremost calligraphers working today. The scroll’s subject – and title – is “Immortal at the River,” referencing a poem by 16th century Chinese poet Yang Shen.
Two weeks before the first annual CCAT-prime collaboration meeting was scheduled to be held April 7 at the University of Waterloo, the COVID-19 pandemic forced a switch to an online format.
Because the telescope is an international project with scientists in wildly disparate time zones, conference organizers faced major challenges.
The next generation of powerful Earth- and space-based telescopes will be able to hunt distant solar systems for evidence of life on Earth-like exoplanets – particularly those that chaperone burned-out stars known as white dwarfs.
The chemical properties of those far-off worlds could indicate that life exists there. To help future scientists make sense of what their telescopes are showing them, Cornell astronomers have developed a spectral field guide for these rocky worlds.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia held arguments by phone on Tuesday in a case pitting the Trump administration against the House of Representatives over the latter’s power to enforce a subpoena for former White House Counsel Donald McGahn’s testimony.
Rachel Beatty Riedl, an expert in international studies, says Africa is the first place to look for an effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, given Africa’s success in dealing with the Ebola virus.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers hopes to shape Congress’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic and encourage a less divisive – and more productive – climate in Washington, a pair of members said during a Cornell forum April 23.
Faced with a devastating and unresolved pandemic, governments worldwide are grappling with how to begin re-opening their economies, while protecting the health of their citizens. And many are looking to the smartphones in our pockets as a contact tracing tool to keep tabs on the coronavirus and limit its spread.
Historian Lawrence Glickman says the simultaneous public health disaster and economic meltdown may lead us to rethink the country’s values. However, “given … how rare it is for fundamental transformations to happen, my money would be on this pandemic not fundamentally altering our basic structures of society,” he says.
The coronavirus pandemic's fast-moving destruction has pushed Republicans to rely on the Affordable Care Act, the Obama-era legislation that was once the Republican Party's nemisis, writes Suzanne Mettler, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions, in a Washington Post op-ed.
