Latin America has become the world’s most violent region outside of a war zone, including the only one in which homicide rates have increased in the 21st century, according to the U.N.
Although public safety is now the top concern across Latin America, some countries have succeeded in raising taxes on the wealthy to address the issue while others have not. In his new book, “Contemporary State…
Noël Heaney/Cornell University
Matthew Dallos, doctoral student in the field of history, designed the Libe Slope Wild Garden for the Biennial, to “insert a moment of wildness” on campus.
When Isabella Culotta ’22 and Matéa LeBeau ’22 submitted a grant proposal – for an art exhibit centered around the use of human waste as fertilizer – to the Cornell Biennial’s call for entries, they laughed.
“We said, ‘That was fun, see you around,’” said LeBeau. “We were serious about the proposal but never thought it would get funded.”
But the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA), which…
Global Cornell has awarded five International Cornell Curriculum (ICC) grants totaling $114,000 to support faculty developing courses that feature international experiences for students. The resulting courses will be offered in 2023.
The funded proposals add short-term international experiences to existing courses or create new courses designed in tandem with partners abroad. Collaboration…
Lindsay France/Cornell University
Cornell President Martha E. Pollack delivers her State of the University address Oct. 14 in Kennedy Hall.
Cornell’s aspirations and achievements, the success of its ongoing fundraising campaign and its extraordinary faculty and students were highlights of President Martha E. Pollack’s State of the University address, delivered Oct. 14 to an on-campus audience of more than 450 Trustee-Council Annual Meeting attendees in Kennedy Hall, as well as livestream viewers.
“The work that Cornell is…
The establishment of a new leadership position in the Office of the Vice President for Research and Innovation (OVPRI) is among the steps announced Oct. 13 to sustain successful strategies and initiatives in support of collaborative, interdisciplinary research at Cornell.
Julia Thom-Levy, professor of physics in the College of Arts and Sciences, has been named associate vice provost for…
Provided
View of a cell before (left) and after lipid expansion microscopy is applied, showing details of the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), an organelle involved in cell membrane processes.
Lipids – fats – make great walls for cells and organelles because they are water resistant and dynamic. But those same characteristics also make them hard to image using expansion microscopy, a technique that works for magnifying other cell components.
Researchers in the lab of Jeremy Baskin, associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology in the College of Arts and Sciences and…
The halting, confusing response to COVID-19 in the U.S. resulted from decisions by President Donald Trump and his allies to politicize the pandemic by associating it with his own fate in office, according to a new book by a Cornell author.
In the new book, “Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID,” survey data demonstrates how the Trump administration’s…
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Citizen scientists Kevin M. Gill and Fernando Garcia Navarro created this colorful, highly artistic view of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, taken from JunoCam on the Juno mission’s close flyby Sept. 29. JPL/NASA released this image on Oct. 6.
New images from NASA’s Juno spacecraft mission Sept. 29 flyby of Jupiter’s moon Europa – an icy world that may host a life-giving, salty ocean beneath its thick crust – brings an upcoming major mission into frigid focus.
In two years, NASA will launch the Europa Clipper spacecraft to survey the frozen moon looking for signs that support life. The craft – arriving in April…
Noël Heaney/Cornell University
Authors Michelle Cronin, left, and Tyler Hill are among the 14 authors from upstate New York participating in the Oñgwaga•ä’ Writers Workshop
Tyler Hill couldn’t find a children’s book about Native American kids who play lacrosse to read to his three children at bedtime. So he wrote one himself.
“Wormburner” follows the story of Canoe, a 10-year-old Native American boy whose life revolves around lacrosse. The title comes from a type of fast, targeted lacrosse shot in which the ball whips just above the ground’s surface.
“I wanted…
Natasha Raheja/Provided
A Pakistani migrant woman, at right, meets with Indian Ministry of Home Affairs officials in Jodhpur, India, in July 2016.
Pakistani nationals of the Hindu faith migrate to India based on religion, caste, culture and history – and lately Indian government officials all the way up to the prime minister have been encouraging them to “return,” according to Natasha Raheja, assistant professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S).
But at the border, many hopeful migrants find that Indian…
Provided
This image, featured in a 2008 paper in Science that was co-authored by Jeremy M. Baskin, associate professor of chemistry and chemical biology, shows a developing zebrafish larva in which the sugars on the surface of individual cells are fluorescently tagged with copper-free click chemistry.
As doctoral students nearly 20 years ago, two Cornell researchers played an early role in the development of the work that was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in chemistry.
This year’s honorees – Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless – received the prize for their efforts in pioneering click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry. Click chemistry, developed by Sharpless and…
Ryan Young/Cornell University
Creating a 3D model of a mummified bird from Cornell’s Anthropology Collections.
Since late 2021, Carol Anne Barsody, a master’s student in archaeology, has been working to unravel the mysterious origins of a mummified sacred ibis that has been stored at Cornell for nearly 100 years, most recently as part of the Anthropology Collections in the College of Arts and Sciences.
The mummy bird – and Barsody’s research into its historical context and extraordinary…
Lisa Godfrey
Evon and Sydney Antonio sustainably manage 450 acres of forestland in Greene County, New York.
For Sydney Antonio, a love of forests took root during childhood summers visiting upstate New York, where she and her cousins explored family-owned property covered by red oak, white ash, hard maple and other trees.
Today, she and her husband, Evon Antonio, sustainably manage 450 of those acres in Greene County as certified Tree Farmers and New York Master Forest Owner volunteers. But while…
Darren Xu
A large-scale phylogenetic tree constructed from a diverse set of RNR sequences reveals a small ancestral clade in addition to the three major groups. Cryo-EM characterization of a representative sequence from this clade suggests that the enzyme family adapted to oxygen on earth earlier than previously thought.
Cornell scientists have created an evolutionary model that connects organisms living in today’s oxygen-rich atmosphere back billions of years – to a time when Earth’s atmosphere had little oxygen – by analyzing ribonucleotide reductases (RNRs), a family of proteins used by all free-living organisms and many viruses to repair and replicate DNA.
“By understanding the evolution of these…
Serge Petchenyi / Cornell University
Students participate in an in-class discussion.
In her first two years at Cornell, Emily Shapland ’24 noticed something different about her electives in the Department of Classics.
“They were the most engaging classes I’ve taken at Cornell, classes that I always looked forward to,” said Shapland, a biological sciences major in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S). “It made a big difference in my learning, especially coming to Cornell…
This January, you can study animal science, the arts, business, design, economics, hospitality, government and more during Cornell's Winter Session 2023.
Beginning Oct. 17, students can enroll in a wide range of online courses taught by Cornell faculty. Enrollment is open to anyone interested in taking a class—from undergrads and high school students to alumni and motivated…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Léa Bonnefoy ‘15, a post-doctoral researcher, led a team of Cornell scientists to characterize the Dragonfly mission's landing site on Saturn’s moon Titan. The rotorcraft is expected to launch in 2027 and reach that moon in 2034.
When NASA’s 990-pound Dragonfly rotorcraft reaches the Selk crater region – the mission’s target touchdown spot – on Saturn’s moon Titan in 2034, Cornell’s Léa Bonnefoy '15 will have helped to make it a smooth landing.
Bonnefoy and her colleagues assisted the future arrival by characterizing the equatorial, hummocky, knoll-like landscape by combining and analyzing all of the radar images…
Thitirat Boonyanuphong who works at the Statler Hotel, is using Cornell's Part Time Study program to earn credits toward a degree
When Thitirat Boonyanuphong isn’t on her housekeeping rounds at the Statler Hotel or teaching conversational Thai at Cornell’s Language Resource Center, the 43-year-old can be found in a classroom on campus earning college credits.
For the last eight semesters, Boonyanuphong has steadily taken courses that will help her meet the requirements for pursuing a master’s degree in Asian Studies…
Natural disasters may be impossible to prevent, but much of the devastation that occurs in their aftermath – specifically the forced displacement of people – is driven by government policy and can be averted, according to Maria Cristina Garcia, the Howard A. Newman Professor of American Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences.
In her new book, “State of Disaster: The Failure of U.S…
European Southern Observatory / L. Calçada
In this illustration, exoplanet CoRoT-7b, which is likely five times the mass of Earth, may well be full of lava landscapes and boiling oceans.
The exploration era for the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is getting hot – volcanically hot.
A multidisciplinary group of Cornell researchers has modeled and synthesized lava in the laboratory as the kinds of rock that may form on far-away exoplanets. They developed 16 types of surface compositions as a starter catalog for finding volcanic worlds that feature fiery landscapes and…
Ryan Young/Cornell University
Ann Simmons, the Wall Street Journal’s Moscow Bureau Chief and the fall 2022 Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist Fellow, speaks as part of a panel Sept. 22 in the Schwartz Center for Performing Arts.
Energy rationing in Europe. Shifting global alliances. The end of the free world.
Those dire consequences and others were raised by a panel of faculty and journalist experts during a Sept. 22 panel discussion about the ongoing conflict that began with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The event, “Aftershocks: Geopolitics Since the Ukraine invasion,” was part of the College of Arts and Sciences’…
Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, University of Arizona/Provided
This image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows the edge of the Martian South Pole Layered Deposit. The stack of fine layering is highlighted by the rays of the polar sun.
There is water in many places on Mars, including most of both polar ice caps – all in the frozen form.
But recently, bright reflections were detected beneath the surface of Mars’ South Pole Layered Deposit (SPLD), a 1.4-kilometer-thick formation of relatively pure water ice, by the European Space Agency’s Mars Express orbiter. Some scientists interpreted the observations, collected by the…
Noël Heaney/Cornell University
Cornell researchers installed electronic “brains” on solar-powered robots that are 100 to 250 micrometers in size, so the tiny bots can walk autonomously without being externally controlled.
A collaborative effort has installed electronic “brains” on solar-powered robots that are 100 to 250 micrometers in size – smaller than an ant’s head – so that they can walk autonomously without being externally controlled.
While Cornell researchers and others have previously developed microscopic machines that can crawl, swim, walk and fold themselves up, there were always “strings”…
Provided
The Greek island of Santorini, traditionally known as Thera, experienced one of the largest volcanic eruptions in the Holocene epoch, most likely between 1609 and 1560 BCE, according to a new analysis
One of the largest volcanic eruptions in the Holocene epoch – as measured by the volume of material ejected – occurred on the Greek island of Santorini, traditionally known as Thera. It is considered a pivotal event in the prehistory of the Aegean and East Mediterranean region, with the city of Akrotiri, buried some 1,600 years before Pompeii, becoming one of the key archaeological sites of…
Lindsay France/Cornell University
During an April 2021 clinic, Cornell community members receive COVID-19 vaccines in Bartels Hall.
Six Cornell faculty members from three different colleges will work together to improve epidemiological models of infectious disease, including by better incorporating human behavior into the models, using a $1 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
COVID-19 made clear the need for improved models. Organizations at all levels of society, from small businesses and schools to…
To mitigate climate change, physicist David Specht, M.S. ’18, Ph.D. ’21, feeds electricity to microbes.
In turn, the insatiable Vibrio natriegens bacteria – the fastest duplicating organism on Earth, able to double itself in about 10 minutes – gorge on a sparky feast, but then the microbe can help scientists and farmers free up arable land, nourish livestock and feed farmed fish.
The V…
National Cancer Institute/Unsplash
breast cancer cells
A team of researchers has discovered a non-invasive biomarker that could aid with earlier diagnosis of breast cancer, the most common cancer among women, which will likely affect one in 13 women during their lives.
Advanced stage and metastatic breast cancer is considered incurable with current treatment options, with very poor prognosis. Early detection of breast cancer metastasis is…
Sydney Shoemaker, Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy Emeritus in the College of Arts and Sciences, died Sept. 3 after a brief illness. He was 90.
Remembered as a powerful thinker and brilliant teacher, Shoemaker contributed to the outstanding reputation of Cornell philosophy during the second half of the twentieth century, said Derk Pereboom, Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and…
NASA/Provided
The famed Barringer Meteor Crater in the desert in northern Arizona. Two students affiliated with the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy's Tech Policy Institute will analyze public opinion on how governments should respond when asteroids and comets threaten the earth.
Two students directed by government professor Sarah Kreps will conduct public opinion surveys on planetary defense – how governments respond when asteroids and comets threaten cities, countries, or at the extreme, even the entire earth.
The team has been awarded a research grant by the International Academy of Astronautics, a United Nations-recognized non-governmental organization based in…
Provided
St. Hovhannes Church of Chahuk (built in the 12th or 13th century and renovated in the 17th and 19th centuries) was destroyed between 1997 and 2009, as documented in a new report from Caucasus Heritage Watch.
A new report from the Cornell-led Caucasus Heritage Watch (CHW) has compiled decades of high-resolution satellite imagery to document the complete destruction of Armenian cultural heritage in the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan beginning in the late 1990s.
Moreover, the latest finding of CHW’s heritage monitoring project suggests that the same policy of cultural erasure now…
An acclaimed historian of the Caribbean and a multidisciplinary professor of the built environment have been appointed the newest A.D. White Professors-at-Large.
Sir Hilary Beckles, vice chancellor of the University of the West Indies (UWI) and a noted reparations advocate, and Mabel O. Wilson, the Nancy and George Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia…
Jonathan Miller/Provided
Khadija Monis ’24 completed an internship at the Ithaca Doula Access Initiative.
A trained midwife in her native Afghanistan, Khadija Monis ’24, dreamed of one day opening a hospital for maternal and child health. Her experiences this last year at Cornell have made that dream more achievable, she said.
“I’m now living in a bigger world, with a different view than the world I was in,” said Monis, who is majoring in interdisciplinary studies in the College of Agriculture and…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Doctoral student Abhinav Jindal, standing in front of a Rosetta mission image of Comet 67P, modeled the evolution of smooth terrain on that frozen world.
With an eye toward a possible return mission years in the future, Cornell astronomers have shown how smooth terrains – a good place to land a spacecraft and to scoop up samples – evolve on the icy world of comets.
By applying thermal models to data gathered by the Rosetta mission – which caught up to the barbell-shaped Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko almost a decade ago – they show that…
Warden Lab/Provided
The lateral habenula in the mouse brain, with axons streaming down to dopaminergic and serotonergic centers.
A tiny but important area in the middle of the brain acts as a switch that determines when an animal is willing to work for a reward and when it stops working, according to a study published Aug. 31 in the journal Current Biology.
“The study changes how we think about this particular brain region,” said senior author Melissa Warden, assistant professor and Miriam M. Salpeter Fellow in the…
Jason Koski/Cornell University
Evening on Libe Slope
The Presidential Advisors on Diversity and Equity (PADE) have awarded three Belonging at Cornell innovation grants for 2022 programming, for projects addressing a range of topics involving diversity, equity and inclusion on all of Cornell’s campuses.
Similar to last year, PADE had originally sought two projects in its request for proposals, but three projects stood out such that the…
Credit: NASA/Provided
Evidence of carbon dioxide was found by the new James Webb Space Telescope on exoplanet WASP-39b, which is shown in this artistic rendering.
NASA’s powerful James Webb Space Telescope opens a new chapter in scientific history, as a large international team – including several Cornell astronomers – found molecular evidence of carbon dioxide on the exoplanet WASP-39b, a giant gaseous world orbiting a sun-like star about 700 light-years away.
The international group’s findings, supported by hundreds of scientists across dozens of…
Noël Heaney/Cornell University
Kofi Acree, director of the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library and curator of Africana Collections in Cornell University Library, speaks with gardeners outside the installation at the Cornell Botanic Gardens.
Plain grits, made by his aunt and grandmother, were the only thing Kofi Acree would eat as a baby. Now he makes grits for himself in all sorts of ways – with shrimp and tomato sauce, with cheese and eggs.
Foods like grits, made from corn, offer a connection to the plants enslaved people of African descent used to survive and thrive, Acree says.
“The fact that I’m carrying on something that…
Cornell University
Cornell University James Turner, the founding director of Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center and a a professor emeritus of African and African American Politics and Social Policy in the College of Arts and Sciences, died Aug. 6 in Ithaca.
James Turner, the founding director of Cornell’s Africana Studies and Research Center and a pioneer of the multidisciplinary approach to exploring the African diaspora, died Aug. 6 in Ithaca. He was 82.
Turner, a professor emeritus of African and African American Politics and Social Policy in the College of Arts and Sciences, shaped generations of Black scholars and other diverse students…
Noël Heaney/Cornell
2022 Warrior-Scholars Samuel Espino (Left, Active Duty Air Force) and Marbin Garcia Renoj (Right, Active Duty Marine Corps) look at equipment during a tour of the Newman Accelerator Laboratory.
Touring Newman Laboratory’s high bay on a recent afternoon, 22-year-old Sophia Malate came across a familiar piece of hardware: a 10-ton overhead crane.
Two weeks earlier at Marine Corps Air Station New River in Jacksonville, North Carolina, she’d been part of a crew that used similar equipment to remove and replace a main rotor blade on a CH-53E Super Stallion heavy-lift helicopter, part of…
School closures during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic may have resulted in at least 5,500 fewer reports of endangered children, according to a new study showing teachers’ essential role in the early detection and reporting of child maltreatment.
Time spent in school and the resulting contact with teachers and other school staff leads to increases in reports of child maltreatment –…
Laura Niemi, assistant professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences and management and organizations in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, has won the 2022 Kaplan Family Distinguished Faculty Fellowship for her work teaching applied moral psychology through community-engaged learning.
Given by Cornell’s David M. Einhorn Center for Community Engagement,…
Jimmy Cawley/Provided
Cornell in Washington participant Jimmy Cawley photographed protestors at the U.S. Supreme Court shortly after the court decision on abortion rights was announced.
From witnessing a massive peaceful protest to contributing to the success of an international effort to feed the hungry, students completing internships in Washington, D.C. through the Cornell in Washington program are experiencing an in-person summer to remember.
It is a welcome change after two pandemic summers when internships were often dominated by Zoom meetings and remote work.
…
Bingsen Zhang
C. elegans as seen through a microscope.
Tailoring a person’s diet or medicine based on their genomes has been a goal of the medical community for decades, but the strategy has not been widely successful because people metabolize chemicals differently. A drug may work differently for two patients because they have different metabolism, which may be a result of genetic, environmental, or microbial differences.
Researchers in Professor…
Courtesy of T. Urban
Ground-penetrating radar image of several footprints from the Utah site. Overlapping footprints of several sizes were detected, indicating an adult walking with children. The scenario was confirmed with excavation.
Human footprints believed to date from the end of the last ice age have been discovered on the salt flats of the Air Force’s Utah Testing and Training Range (UTTR) by Cornell researcher Thomas Urban in forthcoming research.
Urban and Daron Duke, of Far Western Anthropological Research Group, were driving to an archaeological hearth site at UTTR when Urban spotted what appeared to be …
Tingey Injury Law Firm/ Unsplash
Justice representation
Following controversial recent Supreme Court decisions on abortion, guns and environmental regulation, expect members of Congress to propose constitutional amendments seeking to counter or extend the rulings, says a Cornell government expert.
Just don’t expect lawmakers to work very hard to win their passage.
Since the mid-20th century, Congress has repurposed Article V of the U.S…
Assessing and contemplating the fate of the American order, an area of overlap in their research, was a natural topic for political scientists Peter Katzenstein and Jonathan Kirshner to address in a collaborative project, their first after more than 20 years as colleagues.
Their co-edited collection, “The Downfall of the American Order?” explores global affairs at this moment in history, a…
Provided
Postdoctoral researcher Rui Zou (right) is supported by a new NSF grant to Cornell researchers working on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). With CLASSE engineer Charlie Strohman, she is working on the Apollo ATCA card, a device for the trigger track project that is part of Cornell-based upgrades to LHC’s Compact Muon Solenoid detector.
In the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an underground 27-kilometer tube beneath the Swiss and French countryside, Cornell physicists smash matter into its component parts to learn about elementary particles and their interactions. A $3.8 million grant from the National Science Foundation will support the team for three more years of research.
“We’re the ultimate reductionists,” said Peter Wittich…
For anyone frustrated by the constant churn of modern life, the desert may seem like a quiet refuge, a place to get away from the clamor of it all. But deserts are not only extreme and isolated environments – they can be noisy ones, too, as early Christian monks discovered when they first trekked into the deserts near Israel and Egypt in search of a quiet spot for contemplation nearly 1,700 years…
Ann Simmons, The Wall Street Journal’s award-winning Moscow bureau chief, has been named the Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist (DVJ) Fellow in the College of Arts and Sciences for the fall.
The program brings accomplished journalists to Cornell each year to interact with faculty, researchers and students.
“We’re privileged to host Ann Simmons on campus at this time of global turmoil…
