Which came first, overall bigger brains or larger brain regions that control specialized behaviors? Neuroscientists have debated this question for decades, but a new Cornell study settles the score.The study reports that though vertebrate brains differ in size, composition and abilities, evolution of overall brain size accounts for most of these differences, with larger brains leading to greater…
Cornell students Alec Martinez ’18 and Celina Scott-Buechler ’18 received Harry S. Truman Scholarships, which awards $30,000 for graduate studies to juniors who intend to pursue careers in public service. Scott-Buechler, Skye Hart ’18 and Dejah Powell ’18 won Udall Scholarships, which provides $7,000 to undergraduates committed to careers related to the environment or, if they are Native…
The spread of mosquito-borne viruses, including dengue, chikungunya and Zika, has created a public health crisis that poses risks to nearly 4 billion people living in 120 countries.Cornell researchers are exploring a new approach to reducing the spread of the viruses by identifying, and then manipulating seminal fluid proteins from male mosquitoes to disrupt the reproductive biology in females…
The university has launched the Cornell Institute of Host-Microbe Interactions and Disease (CIHMID), an umbrella organization that brings together the wide-ranging community of Cornell researchers studying host-microbe biology and disease.“The scope of the institute is host-microbe interactions ranging from beneficial to pathogenic in plant and animal hosts,” said Brian Lazzaro, the institute’s…
Researchers will seek to uncover fundamental processes in brain development and their links to brain cancers with a new grant.Richard Cerione, Cornell professor of molecular medicine and chemistry and chemical biology in the colleges of Veterinary Medicine and Arts and Sciences, has received a four-year, $1.3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to investigate the roles of…
A small fish swims in a stream, when suddenly it sees a larger fish flashing toward it, mouth open, from the left. The little fish instantly makes a hard right turn and darts away.Very little is known about the wiring of nerve cells in the brain that allow a fish, or any animal, to make fundamental choices to move to the left or to the right.A study of zebrafish larvae published Aug. 9 in the…
When it comes to the birds and the bees, frogs are remarkably diverse: They do it in water, on land and on leaves.Researchers have assumed that natural selection drove frogs to take the evolutionary step to reproduce on land as a way for parents to avoid aquatic predators who feed on the eggs and tadpoles.A new study by a team including Cornell frog biologists, published July 26 in American…
In recent years, Cornell has amassed an impressive stable of experts in an emerging field for modern times: The ecology and evolution of infectious disease.Cornell infectious disease researchers span the colleges of Veterinary Medicine, Weill Cornell Medicine, Arts and Sciences and Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), and the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future (ACSF). They trade insights…
Four Cornell faculty members. including two from the College of Arts & Sciences, are among 213 national and international scholars, artists, philanthropists and business leaders elected new fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.“It is an honor to welcome this new class of exceptional women and men as part of our distinguished membership,” said Don Randel, chair of the academy’s…
Some populations of frogs are rapidly adapting to a fungal pathogen calledBatrachochrytrium dendrobatridis (Bd) that has decimated many populations for close to half a century and causes the disease chytridiomycosis, according to a new study.Cornell and University of Central Florida researchers took a step toward identifying the genetic mechanisms that makes some frogs resistant to Bd infections…
Over the past decades, millions of managed colonies of honeybees have died from varroa mites that transmit deadly viruses, yet wild colonies survive.Cornell researchers describe – in the March 11 issue of the journal PLoS One –experiments that help reveal how wild colonies endure mites and pathogens.Without miticides used by beekeepers, managed colonies almost always die out within two or three…
Gene editing, a burgeoning technology that allows scientists to manipulate a specific region of DNA, has profound implications for medicine and agriculture. The technology makes use of a bacterial immune system known as CRISPR, an acronym for “clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats.”Scientists believe there may be as many as five types of such CRISPR systems. So far, scientists…
While studies have shown that humans may have an innate fear of snakes, such trepidation appears to have eluded Joe Fetcho, a Cornell neurobiologist.Fetcho’s childhood fascination for understanding snake locomotion eventually led him to his calling: using zebrafish to answer questions of how neuronal circuits in vertebrate brains produce behaviors.Though Fetcho began graduate school intent on…
Three young Cornell researchers have won National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Awards. Part of the NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program, the awards provide up to $1.5 million over five years for innovative, high-impact projects.Melissa Warden in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and Jesse Goldberg in the College of Arts and Sciences, both assistant…
The idea of introducing a novel gene into a few individuals that then spreads through an entire population sounds like a premise for science fiction. And yet fiction can be prophetic.Cornell researchers have used mathematical models to illuminate the promises – and potential problems – of a new genome editing mechanism, called a gene drive.The mechanism has been long discussed but only recently…
William Provine, the Andrew H. and James L. Tisch Distinguished University Professor Emeritus at Cornell, died Sept. 1 due to complications from a brain tumor at his home in Horseheads, New York. He was 73.Provine, a professor of the history of biology in the departments of History and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, was born Feb. 19, 1942, in Nashville, Tennessee.He joined Cornell as an…
Cornell researchers have used cutting-edge X-ray technology to noninvasively image fruit flies during and after mating. The study, published online ahead of print June 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, describes how researchers used the Cornell Biotechnology Resource Center’s high resolution micro-CT (computed tomography) scanner to acquire detailed 3-D datasets of…
When it’s time for a meal of katydids, bats use their ears. When hunting and eating male katydids, different bat species locate their prey by listening for specific signals in male katydids’ mating calls, according to a recent Cornell, Dartmouth, McMaster University in Canada and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute study. Furthermore, the researchers found that each bat species differed in…
