From our earliest history, humans have contemplated the cosmos. Before we had an inkling of the nature of our own solar system, we wondered at the composition of our sister planets. And long before we knew there were planets orbiting other stars, we wondered if we, earth-bound beings, were alone in the universe.
This need to understand the nature of the universe and our place in it continues to fuel modern astronomy and space exploration, says Jonathan Lunine, the David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences and director of the Cornell Center for Astrophysics and Planetary Science. Lunine is a planetary scientist who studies how planets form and evolve, especially the giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn and their diverse moons. Read more about Lunine's work in this Cornell Research story.
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In "Child of Light," an experimental historical fiction set in 1890s Utica, Jesi Bender-Buell '07 tells the story of a young girl as she tries to understand her world through the interests of her parents: Spiritualism for Mama, electrical engineering for Papa.
Devin Flores/Cornell University
Enslavers posted as many as a quarter-million newspaper ads and flyers before 1865 to locate runaway slaves. Ed Baptist is leading the public crowdsourcing project, Freedom on the Move, that has digitized tens of thousands of these advertisements in an open-source site accessible to the public.
